


deus ex machina

by coloredink



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Cars, Magical Realism, Other, Red Dragon Spoilers, Science Fiction, Season/Series 02, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-04 22:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11564706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink
Summary: "What the hell?" said Katz.  "Is that--""Yeah, I know, it's kinda flashy."  Will shut the car door behind him and patted his pockets for the little fob to lock the car."Isn't thatHannibal Lecter'scar?"The car beeped to indicate it was locked.  "Yeah, I guess so."  Will walked away, toward the field, Katz on his heels.  "I needed a new car.""So you bought thecannibal car?"-----You asked for it: the one where Hannibal is a murderous self-driving car.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [winds_wanderer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/winds_wanderer/gifts).



> For @winds-wanderer, who made a very generous bid on my offer for Fandom Trumps Hate 2017.

"What the hell?" said Katz. "Is that--"

"Yeah, I know, it's kinda flashy." Will shut the car door behind him and patted his pockets for the little fob to lock the car. Apparently all cars these days came with _keyless ignition_. Will thought to himself, rather uneasily, that he didn't know how cars worked anymore. This morning when he'd turned on the car, it'd asked for his destination and even offered to drive him there. Will had yelled _NO!_ at it a number of times, like the car was a new dog that hadn't learned the rules yet.

"Isn't that _Hannibal Lecter's_ car?"

The car beeped to indicate it was locked. "Yeah, I guess so." Will walked away, toward the field, Katz on his heels. "I needed a new car."

"So you bought the _cannibal car?_ "

Will hunched his shoulders and walked faster. "It was cheap."

"Yeah, because nobody wanted the cannibal car! Hannibal Lecter _died_ in that car."

"What do you care?" Will demanded. "You're not the one driving it."

Katz flapped her hands. "Because we're friends. Friendly. And I care about you. And it makes me uncomfortable to know you're driving a car with such intensely bad karma. He carried bodies in that trunk, who knows how many bodies."

"Well it's been cleaned and detailed," said Will. "It's just a car. And the price was right."

\-----

The man was still in the tree, bees buzzing around him, honey dripping down his cheeks from empty eye sockets. He was arranged like he'd simply gone to sleep and never woke up, lying on his side with head pillowed on his folded hands. Price and Zeller were already there, clothed in white beekeeper suits. Jack stood a more respectful distance away, hands in his pockets. Katz accepted the offer of a suit from one of the local police, but Will waved it away. He wasn't afraid of a few bees, and he didn't plan on getting that close. He squinted into the bright sunlight; it made his head hurt.

"Local police were supposed to exterminate the bees," Jack said, "but Price shut that down. Something about Colony Collapse."

"No reason to hasten their extinction, and by proxy, ours," Price called. "Beekeepers will cut out the comb tonight, while the bees are asleep, and move them into their new hive."

Katz looked horrified. "They'll destroy all the evidence!"

"It's half-destroyed already by bees," Zeller muttered. He was clearly having trouble maneuvering the camera while wearing gloves, but he kept the shutter whirring.

"Do bees naturally hive in animal or human carcasses?" Jack queried.

"No," Will said immediately. "Decomposition and the presence of other insect life makes it too unstable for a swarm to colonize. Someone probably hived these bees here on purpose."

"Author of the standard monograph on determining time of death by insect activity, ladies and gentlemen," said Katz.

"That doesn't usually include bees," Will muttered.

"Matches the evidence." Zeller was peering into the corpse's eye sockets and mouth with a flashlight. "Looks like the eyes and part of the brain were removed to make room for our busy friends."

"Removed? Not scavenged?" Jack asked.

Zeller shook his head, flicking his flashlight off. "It's hard to tell, but it looks like a clean job. Surgical."

"Other animals wouldn't have been able to get close enough to take the eyes, and certainly not the brain," said Will. "Not with all these bees around."

"Anything else for us?" Jack gave Will a pointed look.

Will sighed. "You say the eyes and brain were removed?"

"Part of the brain," Zeller clarified.

"The frontal lobe?"

"I'm no neurosurgeon, but sure," said Zeller.

"He was lobotomized," said Will. "If you check around the eye sockets, you'll see evidence of a sharp instrument, like an ice pick. Transorbital lobotomy; used to be fashionable to perform them on mental patients in the 1940s." Will paused to let a chill chase its way down his spine.

"So what is this, some kind of hate crime?" said Jack. "Did the killer think this person was mentally ill?"

"The killer's the one who's mentally ill, don't you think?" said Will. "They're lobotomizing people and planting beehives in their heads. At the very least, you know the killer's comfortable with bees," Will added.

"Hmm." Jack sounded noncommittal and dissatisfied at the same time. "Come for the autopsy tomorrow."

\-----

The car hummed to life around Will as soon as he slid into the seat, supposedly a convenient response to someone unlocking the doors and getting into the driver's seat but which Will found creepy as fuck. And an unnecessary boon to thieves, though the car could supposedly distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate attempts to unlock it. Will wouldn't be surprised if the car could learn Will's height and weight too. It was equipped with all kinds of radar, inside and outside, to help it "see" its environment.

The dash lit up. Apparently cars didn't come with old-fashioned needles and meters anymore, either. Everything was colorful LED displays informing Will of his current speed, the amount of fuel he had left, miles traveled. A touchscreen on the dashboard featured a Google map of Will's current location and, if desired, directions to the destination. It could also toggle to display what music was currently playing, the weather, and the contact list from his cell phone.

"What is your destination?" the car asked in a pleasant robotic voice. It'd come with several voice options; Will had picked a vaguely British female as the least irritating. He hadn't found an option to have no voice at all.

"Home," Will told it. "And no, you're not driving me there."

"I understand that you do not want to engage the self-drive," said the car, with an emphasis on _not_. "Statistically, it is safer for you and those around you if you engage the self-drive. Most recently, in Maine an accident was preven--"

"I know," said Will. "I'll take my life in my own hands, thanks. Just shut up and let me drive."

And why wouldn't he want to drive the car himself? It handled like a dream. The steering wheel responded to the smallest touch, and the lightest tap of the gas pedal sent the car surging forward. And it was so _quiet_ ; he'd taken the car almost up to a hundred once, on a straight and clear part of the interstate, and had been both exhilarated and terrified by how that hadn't felt like anything at all. He kind of wanted to take the car to a racetrack or something and really tear loose. Instead, he crawled through the traffic that surrounded Quantico on a Friday afternoon, crept past construction, and finally turned the car down the badly maintained rural road to his house. The car's suspension could more than handle it, but it shouldn't have to. He should at least patch up his driveway.

The garage had once been a barn and still looked like one, with high ceilings and a wood exterior. Will used it mostly for storage: a chest freezer for extra fish; extra dog food; an old recliner Will kept meaning to haul to the dump. There was a space just big enough to park a car. The Volvo had looked at home among Will's things; the Bentley, all sleek lines and midnight blue, looked like a peacock in a dumpster. Will hauled down the garage door and headed to the house.

A young woman waited for him on the porch. She had long dark hair, blue eyes, and white skin. She sat by the door with her hands folded in her lap. A long gash ran across her throat, nearly from ear to ear. Blood wept from its edges. Dried blood stained her blouse. She stared at Will, unsmiling, as he mounted the steps to the porch.

Will ignored her and went into the house.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTE: This chapter contains references to suicide.

_Don't stop_ , he thought to himself as Hobbs pushed his wife, blood spurting from her neck and arms, into Will's arms on the porch. She clung to Will, gasping for breath. Will froze, feeling warm blood run down his arms and soak into his shirt. It felt like forever but was probably only seconds. _Don't stop_ , he hissed at himself. He let the poor woman drop to the floorboards and raced into the house, gun drawn.

The first room he entered was the living room of a nice, middle class Midwestern family, with a working fireplace, overstuffed furniture, and knotty exposed wood paneling. The cushions looked like they'd been homemade out of tanned animal hide. Perhaps Hobbs had made them, or perhaps his wife, whom Will had just left bleeding out on the porch to die alone and without comfort.

Noise in the kitchen. Will followed it, gun still drawn. Garret Jacob Hobbs had his daughter by the neck, his knife held to her throat. Will saw all the other victims in her dark hair, her wind-roughened cheeks, her fair skin. She was terrified, but not crying. _Brave girl_ , he thought to himself. He leveled his gun. It was too close, too close, too close to shoot without risking hitting the girl.

"Drop the knife," he heard himself say, and Abigail's blood splattered across the floor. Will pulled the trigger just a moment after, and he pulled it until he heard the hammer click empty. By then, Hobbs was sprawled against the cabinets in the corner. Will dropped the gun and hurried to Abigail's side. Hobbs, or perhaps the knife, had done the job well. Will couldn't stop the bleeding.

"Will."

Will twitched to the side. He looked at Hobbs, who leered back at him with vacant eyes. But that hadn't been his voice.

"Will, wake up."

The kitchen faded away.

Will had the sense that he was in a car. He was upright, slumped to his side, with his face almost pressed against the window glass; the only thing keeping him from it was the seat belt. It was quiet and warm and comfortable. He didn't know how fast they were going, or where. It didn't matter. Someone else was driving.

"You seemed as if you were having a nightmare," said a voice from the driver's seat. Will had never heard this voice before: deep, masculine, with an accent he couldn't quite identify beyond "European, probably." 

"I was." Will didn't open his eyes.

"This is better than sleepwalking, wouldn't you say?" the voice continued.

"What?" Will did open his eyes then, and looked.

The voice wasn't familiar, but the face was: it stared out paternally from the cover of Freddie Lounds' book, _Hannibal the Cannibal_. Will hadn't read the book; he had no interest in the book, which he heard was riddled with typos because of the way it'd been rushed to press. But he knew what had happened; everyone on the Eastern seaboard knew what had happened. Hannibal Lecter, aka the Chesapeake Ripper, the darling of the mid-Atlantic social scene, felt the net of law enforcement drawing closed around him thanks to a sharp and lucky young FBI trainee named Miriam Lass and gassed himself to death in his garage rather than spend the rest of his life in prison or the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Two years later, Will had been in the market for a new car; his twenty-year-old Volvo needed repairs more expensive than it was worth. And there was the Bentley that Hannibal Lecter had died in, and Will won it with the starting bid, for all of two thousand dollars.

He looked around. They were in the Bentley now: there was that fancy lit up dash; the leather-wrapped steering wheel; the air conditioning with separate controls for the left and right and back seat, so that everyone in the car could have their own climate. Lecter was wearing driving gloves and what appeared to be a three-piece suit.

"You're not really here," Will decided.

"Of course not," Lecter agreed. "Your mind is trying to tell you something."

"But what?"

"Perhaps you should wake up and find out," Lecter suggested.

Will did.

He was in the car, on the side of the highway. The amber street lights could barely fight through the darkness to illuminate black asphalt and double yellow stripes. Trees crowded either side of the road, while bright stars studded a dark velvet sky directly overhead. Inside the car, Will was warm and safe and comfortable. Winston whined sharply from the back seat.

"Will Graham, are you there?" the car queried in its soothing robotic voice. "Please respond. If you do not, I will call emergency services in fifteen seconds."

"Where am I?" Will asked, trying not to let his voice shake. When the car did not respond, he repeated the question, this time with the car's pre-programmed name. "Carthage, where am I?"

The little red balloon on the Google Maps display zoomed out, showing Will that he was very close to the Maryland border. "You are on Benjamin St. It will take you sixteen minutes to reach home from your current destination," the car informed him.

"Carthage." Will's voice cracked. His heart wouldn't stop pounding. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Carthage, take me home."

The car whirred to life around Will. The dash brightened, and the car's headlights flooded the roadway with light. Winston gave a low moan. Will's hands shook. The steering wheel turned, sliding through Will's sweaty palms. The car eased back out onto the road. Will's hands didn't stop shaking for a long time, until he was almost home.

\-----

"You were _in the car?_ " Alana's voice went so high at the end that the phone crackled. "Are you okay?" She sounded awake now, at least.

"I'm fine." Will scrubbed his hand over his face and through his hair. His skin was clammy and sticky with sweat; he'd been having a lot of night sweats lately. Since he'd gone back into the field. He badly wanted a shower, but he'd more badly wanted to talk to someone, anyone, about what had just happened. He hadn't even put on pants, just sank down into his recliner with his phone and dialed Alana's number. "I think the car saved me, actually," he admitted. "Guess Price was right about self-driving cars saving the world."

"Thank _God_ ," Alana said. "Wait, when did you get a new car?"

"Just a couple days ago." Will closed his eyes. "The Lecter car went up for auction."

"Oh." 

Alana didn't say anything for so long that Will considered making a joke, just to break the tension. But she said, finally, "Are you having any other symptoms?"

"What's a symptom?" Will knuckled his eye. "Just more of the usual. Nightmares, headaches."

"Have the nightmares gotten any worse? Or the headaches? Any change in your appetite?"

Bertha padded over to nudge Will's hand. He scratched her head. She half-closed her eyes in pleasure. "Nightmares are the same. The headaches might be worse, come to think of it. Appetite's about the same." He pressed the tip of his tongue, briefly, against his soft palate. "But that's all been going on for a few weeks. Months."

The tension on the other end of the line was palpable; Alana had made her feelings very clear to both Jack and Will on Will's continued field work, especially after what had happened with Garret Jacob and Abigail Hobbs.

"It's probably just stress," Will said. "I haven't been sleeping well lately."

"You wouldn't have called me if you thought it was just stress," Alana pointed out. "Talk to me, Will. What's wrong?"

Will hunched over in his seat. Bertha poked her cold nose into his neck. "I just...wanted to talk to someone, I guess."

Alana's end of the line was silent for a moment. "Do you want me to come over?"

Will closed his eyes. "Yeah," he said. "I think I do."

\-----

The sun had risen to about the height of the treetops by the time Alana got there. Will had showered and even made coffee. Now, in the light of day, clean and caffeinated, he felt a little embarrassed to have made such a fuss. But too late now, here was Alana coming up his front steps, looking beautiful and put together and bearing a bag from a bagel shop.

"Hey," she said, stopping on the top step to the porch. "Rough night?"

"Yeah."

Alana opened her arms. Will stepped into them gladly. She was warm and smelled clean. He fought not to close his eyes. "Thanks for coming," he said, muffled, into her shoulder.

"You're welcome." Alana stepped away. "Especially if there's coffee."

"There's coffee," Will said. "I'm not an animal."

A few minutes later, they were sitting on the porch, drinking coffee and eating the bagels, which had come with cream cheese spread and smoked salmon. The dogs, after making desultory attempts at the cream cheese and salmon, were sniffing around in the grass, save for Lulu, who was curled up in Alana's lap, half-asleep. Alana stared off into the middle distance, in the general direction of Will's barn-turned-garage. It was starting to turn warm.

"You really bought Hannibal's car?" she asked.

"Yeah," said Will. "Came up at auction. It was cheap."

"What happened to your old car?"

"Check engine light was on. I took it to the mechanic and he said the computer needed to be replaced. Would have cost over two grand; more than the car was worth. I thought I should just get a new one."

Alana smirked into her coffee. "The new car must be more computer than car."

Will snorted. "I can't figure out half the things it does. I think it might be smarter than me."

Alana turned serious again. "It might have saved your life."

"It might," Will agreed. He finished off his bagel, licked his fingers, and, since Alana was still staring at the garage, offered, "Do you want to see it?"

Alana grimaced. "I'm trying to decide if it'd be a good idea."

"Why would it be a bad idea?"

"I don't know. I'm worried it's morbid. That it'll bring things up that I thought I'd finished processing. But maybe I do need the...I don't know if closure is the right word for it." Alana gently tumbled Lulu off her lap before standing.

They shuffled across the spring grass to the garage. Neither of them spoke; Will suspected that Alana wanted to be alone with her thoughts. She'd known Hannibal Lecter--mentored under him, as a matter of fact, at Johns Hopkins. Attended his dinner parties. There'd been rumors that maybe they'd been more than friendly. She'd objected strenuously to the accusations against him. But then Lecter had been found dead in the garage, and then they'd found the basement, and Alana had fallen silent.

The garage didn't have an automatic door; Will had to haul it up by a handle and flick on the lights. It smelled strongly of dust, motor oil, and moldy cardboard. The car looked black in the low lighting. Alana laughed when she saw it. "He'd be so angry to see his car in a place like this," she said.

Will had to laugh too. "Would he?"

"He wouldn't show it. He'd just get this look on his face." Alana pressed her lips together and brought her eyebrows down in an expression Will could only think to describe as "stern." "If he did say anything, it'd be in this polite yet really catty way, and you might not even know you'd been insulted until four hours later."

Will chuckled and leaned against the hood of the car. "He sounds like an asshole."

"He wasn't, really, but you probably wouldn't have gotten along," Alana admitted. "I don't think you had a single thing in common." Alana came to lean against the car as well, next to Will. She sighed. Will waited.

"It's weird, knowing now...what he was," Alana said. "What he was doing. Knowing that I...at all those dinner parties…" She swallowed. Alana had been vegetarian ever since the news. Stopped drinking beer, too. Will hadn't asked why. "But he was good, too," Alana said. "He donated a lot of money to charity, especially the arts. He was on all those boards of trustees. He wrote cards to children at the children's hospital. He was funny and charming...or I thought he was." She looked down at her shoes. They were dark blue pumps, incongruous against the dusty floor of Will's garage. They matched the car. "I wasn't really able to talk to anyone about it afterward. There's not really a support group for people who were friends with people who turned out to be serial killers."

Will shifted, feeling the car at his back, the plastic body almost warm in the cold garage. Whoever bought a car like this had taste. Expensive taste that ran toward ostentatious. Yes, that was the word: that was the sense Will had always gotten from those photos of the Chesapeake Ripper's murders. Ostentatious. Narcissistic. Whimsical. And, underneath all that, a deep artistic sensitivity. This was someone who saw a flaw in the world and corrected it; who thought he had the _right_ to correct it in blood. "Serial killers don't usually have friends."

Alana wrapped her arms around herself. "I'm glad we never slept together."

"Me too." Will put his arm around her then, because she looked small and seized by a past whose memories chilled rather than warmed her. She didn't pull away, but she didn't lean into him either. Will let his arm drop back to his side after a minute.

"It's just hard to believe it was all a lie," she said. "I mean...he cried at the opera. I saw him. How does a man like that kill all those people? And--" She cut herself off with her top teeth digging into her lip. Will knew what she was afraid to give voice to. It was one thing to murder people; another to eat them afterward; and yet another to feed their flesh to unwitting dinner guests.

"I think he was in my dream last night," Will said.

Alana blinked. "You dreamed about Hannibal?"

"I think so. Halfway through, anyway. I was having a--I was dreaming about something else, but then he showed up. With the car, actually." Will gave a single shrug. "Dream logic."

"Huh." Alana stared straight ahead for a few seconds. "Now I'm thinking that if Hannibal had been alive, when Jack had come to me asking for someone to do a psych eval…"

"You would have recommended Hannibal?" Will said, startled.

"I wouldn't have wanted to do it myself," Alana admitted. She looked at her shoes. "And he's...he was a good psychiatrist."

"You did evaluate me yourself," Will pointed out.

"I thought you wouldn't want anyone else doing it," Alana said. "Someone you didn't know. I was hoping that I would find something, so that you didn't have to go back into the field."

"But I wanted to," Will said.

"I know." Alana looked back up at him. "'No more Abigail Hobbses,' you said." She gave him a half-smile. "I was afraid that something would happen, you know. I advised Jack against letting you get too close, and he--When you went into Port Haven I was afraid you'd never come out again." Her voice trembled a little; she swallowed, and it firmed. "But I guess it was good for you after all, because you did come back out, and you came straight to me and said that you wanted to go back into the field, because you didn't want any more Abigails, and you seemed perfectly sound."

"I am," said Will, and didn't mention that it was because he'd lied. He gone to Port Haven because he'd kept seeing Abigail Hobbs out of the corner of his eye, and that had never stopped. 

\-----

By the time Alana left, the dogs were all bunched around Will's ankles and staring with large, doleful eyes. He poured out their kibble into a trough on the back porch and bowls on the front porch; a couple of the smaller dogs were slow eaters and tended to get pushed aside by their larger packmates. While the dogs crunched, Will tossed the bagel bag that Alana had left behind and stared into his fridge, which contained a carton of orange juice past its sell-by date and a bottle of ketchup.

It was Friday. The newest FBI Academy was wrapping up today and Will was not scheduled to lecture, and he wouldn't lecture again until the next Academy who knows when. He would no longer have the flimsy excuse of classes to ward off Jack Crawford's probing fingers. The dogs needed more food; the porch needed to be washed and so did the windows; there was a closet door inside that needed fixing. There were a thousand ways to occupy his time that didn't involve looking at dead bodies weeping bees from their eye sockets, except that goddammit, Jack had said there'd be an autopsy today. Will shut the refrigerator door and went looking for his phone, which he suspected he'd forgotten to plug in again.

The land line rang, shrill in the dusty silence of Will's home, while Will was still trying to locate his cellphone. He jumped and snatched it up on the second ring. "Hello."

"Did you get my message?" Jack asked.

"No," Will said. His phone wasn't in his bag, his jacket pocket, or his pants pocket. He'd probably left it in the car.

"Autopsy should be wrapping up by end of business today, so I'm thinking we'll meet around four," said Jack. "You'll be there?"

It wasn't really a question. "Yeah," Will said.

"See you then," said Jack.

"See you," Will agreed and hung up. He looked out his living room window. Abigail, out in the grass, gazed back.

\-----

"Duncan Halloran," said Katz. "Fifty-two, divorced, and bankrupt. Reported missing six weeks ago."

"Will was right," Zeller said. "Marks of a long, thin, pointed instrument around the eye sockets. I'd feel comfortable confirming the hypothesis of a transorbital lobotomy, all things considered."

"Found a lot of other things, too," said Price. "Halloran was in extremely poor health even before he was lobotomized and stuffed with bees. Judging from the state of his back, I'd say he was in chronic pain."

"But he lost his workman's comp for it," said Katz. "No financial help coming, and he'd already bankrupted himself trying to treat it. No kids, one sister who lives in Oregon; she's the one who reported him missing. She was afraid it was suicide." The corners of her mouth turned down.

"Well, it wasn't," said Zeller. "No way he could have done this to himself. But the truth's not any better: white blood cell count was through the roof when he died."

Jack's eyebrows drew together. "So he died of...an infection?"

"Ding," said Price. "You can live through quite a bit of brain trauma, depending on how it's done. Many of those mental patients that Will referred to died, but a lot of them lived, although they needed spoonfeeding and diapering for the rest of their lives."

"He wouldn't have known anything toward the end," Will murmured. He could see it now: six weeks ago it had been the very beginning of spring. Perhaps the tree the man had been in had been blooming; certainly the fields around would have been thick with flowers. Plenty for the bees to feast on, and the man himself wouldn't have known anything was happening. There were worse ways to go. Will stepped forward to gaze down at the excavated skull, still streaked with dried honey. "No pain, no feelings of inadequacy, no suffering. He died happy and carefree as a child, his skull populated with busy, buzzing citizens of spring." He cocked his head. A single bee crawled out from between the corpse's teeth and shook its wings. Will blinked, and the bee vanished. "She's an angel of mercy," he declared, looking up.

"She?" Jack said. "You're sure?"

"No," Will admitted, "but it's likely. Fifty-fifty. You're looking for someone who works in the medical field, like a doctor or a nurse. She should be easy to find. Probably she treated this man and thought he'd be better off dead than alive."

\-----

"You guys wanna get dinner?" Katz asked, after Mr. Halloran had been stowed away and everyone had stripped off their gloves and changed out of their lab jackets. Even so, Will couldn't shake the feeling that he smelled like the inside of an old meat case. Corpse molecules stuck to his clothes.

"Five Guys?" Price suggested. Katz and Zeller nodded vigorously.

Katz turned to Will. "Well?" When Will hesitated, she bulled on, "C'mon, you don't actually want to leave now, do you? Traffic's gonna be hell on the way back, and I know you like Five Guys."

"Not that that's not a very nice car to be stuck in traffic in," Zeller said. They were in the parking lot by now, and Zeller had pulled to the side of Will's car like a magnet. "Uh. Can I drive this sometime? Or even just ride in it, if you don't want me to drive."

Price recoiled. "You want to ride in the _cannibal car?_ "

"What?" Zeller protested. "It's been cleaned and detailed. It's just like any other two hundred and fifty thousand dollar car now."

Katz rolled her eyes. "Are you coming?" she asked Will.

"I do like Five Guys," Will admitted.

Thirty minutes later found the four of them in a Five Guys in Dumfries, sharing a bag of fries and munching companionably on their burgers. Will thought the retro-style kitsch was a little much, but he appreciated that they were unpretentious, and the burgers were good. Surrounded by the smell of grilled beef and fried potatoes, Will couldn't smell the corpse on himself anymore. Maybe that was why Katz and Zeller and Price liked coming here.

"So," said Zeller, " _can_ I drive the car sometime?"

"Why are you so fixated on the car?" Katz demanded.

Zeller opened his eyes wide. "It's a really nice car! If I'd known it was going to be up for auction, I would've bid on it myself."

"Good thing you didn't, because I got it for really, really cheap," Will said, just before taking a big bite of his burger. Zeller moaned. If Zeller had bid on the car, though, Will wasn't sure he'd have cared to get into a bidding war over it. Will finished chewing and swallowed. "Sure, you can drive it sometime."

"Yes!" Zeller punched the air.

"Not tonight, though," Will said. "I gotta pick up a few things on the way home."

"Are you letting the car drive?" Price asked with a lecturing look. "You should."

"Sometimes," Will said. "It takes some getting used to."

"Can we talk about something besides the cannibal car?" Katz interjected. "Like, I don't know, politics? Religion? It's putting me off my dinner."

Price and Zeller booed at her. Will hid his smile in his burger.

"You wouldn't mind letting Zeller drive, would you?" Will said to the car, later, on the way home from PetCo with fifty pounds of dog food in the trunk. "I actually don't feel that great about it," he admitted. "I've never liked other people driving my car." He gave a wry chuckle. "I don't even like my car driving my car." He drove in silence for a few minutes. The headlights flashed off a pair of eyes in the bushes. A raccoon, judging from the height. "My dad was the same way," Will said. "Possessive, I guess. A car's like part of the family, after a while, or maybe more like a pet. Something you need to protect." His lips quirked at that. Funny, to think of this expensive foreign import, formerly owned by a billionaire cannibal, now belonging to the same family as his pack of stray mutts.

Not much traffic at this time of night, and the Bentley ate up the miles, some singer Will didn't know the name of crooning gently from the state-of-the-art sound system. The Bentley didn't have a tape deck or a CD player; apparently everyone streamed music from their phones or whatever nowadays. Will didn't know or care to learn how to do that--and he didn't have any music on his phone--but he was fine with listening to the radio. It was what he'd always done. He'd found a Virginia station that played music he remembered from high school and kept it there, mostly. It was just background noise while he let his thoughts wander.

"Wolf Trap?" Alana had said, when Will told her about the house. "Will, that's ages away from anywhere you work. You'll spend all your time in the car."

Will didn't mind. For the sake of those acres around his house, for the streams nearby where he could fish, he would spend all that time in the car. He was used to it; his childhood had, seemingly, been nothing but a blur of new places and faces, strung together by long stretches in his father's truck, when his father had gotten tired of the rich people here or the asshole manager there and decided to get the hell out, try a different boatyard farther north or west or south.

"Wonder what kind of music your old owner used to listen to," Will mused as he dialed the sound to low, once a commercial came on. Nice thing about this new car: he could change stations and volume using buttons on the steering wheel. "I'm guessing...classical. Alana said we didn't have anything in common." Will drummed his fingers against the steering wheel for a minute. "Not that I have anything against classical music; I just never listened to it much. Mostly I listened to whatever my dad listened to, and when I got older I listened to whatever my friends listened to. Never developed a taste of my own, I guess."

The radio went staticky. Will didn't pay much attention; this happened a lot during his long drives, which was one reason he didn't mind listening to silence in the car. Sometimes it came back on a different station, particularly if he'd just crossed a state or county line, but he'd never heard it come back on _classical music_. Actually, judging from all the warbling in a different language, it was _opera_. Will didn't know that the radio even played opera.

He must have brushed the tuner button by mistake. Will thumbed it, sending it back to the station he'd been on before. Five minutes later, during another commercial break, it slipped back into classical music. Not opera this time. Something with violins. The touch screen said it was Vivaldi.

Will let it be. It was pretty, and it was better than listening to commercials.


	3. Chapter 3

Will was in the kitchen, standing over the cast-iron pan, frying sausages. He was waiting for the right time to crack in the eggs. Too early, and the eggs would overcook while the sausages were finishing; too late, and the sausages would burn while the eggs were still half-raw. He liked the yolks runny but the whites firm.

Abigail came into the kitchen, yawning sleepily. "Morning, Dad." Will stiffened. He knew, somehow, what Abigail looked like, even though he hadn't turned his head: hair sticking out, eyes still squinty from sleep, pajama pants and an old t-shirt. Like any other teenage girl rising late on a weekend morning. He heard the refrigerator door open behind him. "Are we out of orange juice?" she asked.

Will couldn't turn around. If he turned around, Abigail would see that he was not her father, and he would have to kill her. He was convinced of this. "Try the door," he said, amazed that he could keep his voice so calm.

"Found it!" Abigail sing-songed. The refrigerator door shut again. "What's for breakfast?" she asked. Her voice was coming closer. Will's grip tightened on the spatula. Sweat gathered on his forehead and the back of his neck.

"Abigail," another voice called. Deep and masculine and familiar, though the accent was hard to place. "Come away from there. He's cooking, don't bother him. It's a very important task."

"Okay," Abigail said with a pout in her voice, and her footsteps moved away. Will turned off the stove and followed her. She'd left the front door open. Will stepped through it and found himself on the front porch of his home in Wolf Trap. Abigail was nowhere to be seen, but perched on the front lawn was the Bentley. Will wasn't surprised to see it there. He went down the steps, across the grass, and around the car to the passenger's side. He got in.

"Hello," said Dr. Lecter.

"Hello," said Will.

Lecter was dressed in a peacock-blue suit, pocket square and everything, like he was on his way to a fancy party. Will realized he was in the underwear he'd gone to sleep in. Lecter didn't seem to mind.

"Thank you," said Will. "I think. For calling her away. That was you, wasn't it?" When Lecter inclined his head, Will went on: "Sometimes I kill her. I always kill her."

"You didn't kill her, in life," said Lecter. "That was her father's doing. Do you wish you were her father, Will? That you could have changed her fate?"

Will leaned back against the headrest. He tried to think of how to answer, but his mind only came up with a puzzled blank.

"Family's a foreign concept to you," Lecter observed.

"Seems like it would have been to you too," said Will. "No spouse, no kids. Not even a cousin. All of your properties were claimed by the state. No next of kin to claim them."

Lecter inclined his head. "The proverbial orphan," he said. "I had a sister, once."

"Had?" said Will.

"I failed to protect her," said Lecter.

Will tried to quash the twinge of sympathy that bubbled up. He refused to feel sympathy for a serial killer, especially in a dream. Finally, he said, "I never knew my mother. It was just my father and me, growing up. He lives in Georgia now. Sends me aftershave every Christmas. I send him money. We don't not get along, but we don't talk much. We don't have much to talk about."

"A foreigner in your own family," said Lecter. "Where did you grow up?"

"Not one particular place. We moved around a lot," Will said. "From boatyard to boatyard, from Biloxi all the way to Erie. That's what my father did: he repaired boats."

"A foreigner in more ways than one," said Lecter. "Always the new boy at school. Always the stranger. Did you grow up poor? Did you resent the rich children whose boats your father worked on?"

Will snorted. "Who doesn't resent the rich?" But he shifted in his seat, suddenly aware of the leather interior, the vivid electronic displays, the chrome accents.

"Are you afraid you've become that which you despised?" Lecter smiled. "The callous wealthy and the coldblooded murderer. Well, you are not a murderer," and here Lecter leaned across the space between them to look Will directly in the eye, "yet." And with that, the doors of the car flung open and Will spilled out of his seat and onto the hard ground. Cold air rushed in. The car's horn blared.

Will woke up. He was standing on the roof of the house; the dogs barked and whined from the open window behind him. Abigail Hobbs stood on the lawn below, staring up.

\-----

He was out of the house and in the car before he really thought much about what he was doing. He was down the driveway and about to ease onto the main road before the thought percolated up to the top that he might want to be doing something different. For one thing, did he really want to be driving right now? He'd just woken up on the roof.

And where did Will think he was going? Alana's, his brain supplied, but he didn't know if she was at home or at the office right now, and Jesus Christ would it hurt him to call first?

Where was his phone?

At this point he'd hesitated so long about pulling onto the road that the car chimed in: "May I help you?"

Will started; the car's voice had changed. Instead of the vaguely British woman's voice, the car now had a vaguely British male voice. "What?"

"May I help you?" the car repeated politely. Yes, the voice had definitely changed. But Will couldn't really pay attention to that right now.

"Uh," Will said. "Carthage, you can drive."

"Understood," said the car. "Where is your destination?"

"I don't care. Go in a big circle. I need to think."

Will half-expected the car to not understand those instructions and ask for a clarification, or possibly take him literally and go off-roading in a giant circle in the surrounding fields. But it was a pretty smart computer after all, because the car only said, "Understood" and wheeled onto the road. Will sat back in his seat and sighed.

It was kind of nice not doing the actual driving. Will was rarely the passenger in someone else's car. When was the last time? Going to a crime scene with Jack, probably; they often carpooled from Quantico, and then Jack would drive Will back for his car. Those weren't relaxing rides. Jack tended to spend the whole ride there giving Will context for the case and the whole ride back prodding Will for his insights and delivering his own opinions. Zeller wanted to carpool with Will now. Maybe he was a more pleasant car companion. Will couldn't see Zee wanting to talk about the case the entire time.

"Would you like me to play some music?" the car queried.

Will let his lips twitch into a smile. "No, thanks for asking."

"Understood."

They merged onto the highway. Will looked out the windshield at the other cars. There weren't many, it being early in the morning on a weekend. The sky promised a rainstorm. Will wondered where the other drivers were going. Work? Visiting friends or family? Just passing through? How many drivers were alone as opposed to with a friend? What did they listen to in the car? Will snuck a look out the passenger side window into a car they were just passing. A child in the back seat stared back, open-mouthed. Will jerked his eyes back to front. The child had looked six or seven years old; Will was bad at telling children's ages. He hadn't gotten a good look at the driver's seat, didn't know if mom or dad or both were in the car, didn't know if there was a sibling also in the back seat.

_Family's a foreign concept to you_.

"Carthage," Will said into the muffled silence. "Take me home."

"Understood," the car replied, and they got off the highway on the next exit. When the radio turned itself on to classical music, Will didn't even complain.

\-----

Both the landline and his cell phone were blinking with messages from Jack when Will got home. He sighed and pressed play on the answering machine. "You have one new message," the robotic voice warbled, much less pleasant than the one in the car. Jack's voice followed:

"We found another body. So to speak. Come in as soon as you hear this."

Will went to feed the dogs.

Jack called again while Will was in the shower, and again while Will was gulping down a scalding cup of coffee. Will picked up the second time. "I'm on my way."

"Good," Jack replied, and hung up.

\-----

This victim was much like the last one: older white male, eyes gone, honey dripping down his cheeks from where his eyes used to be. Unlike Halloran, however, this one groaned and mumbled and twisted at the nylon restraints around his wrists and ankles. Zeller was shining a penlight into his vacant sockets.

"He was found wandering around in a park in Bethesda," Price said. "Lloyd Roat, according to the ID in his pocket. Sixty-two years old. They're still trying to get in touch with his family, if he has any. Something tells me he's a loner like our last victim."

Katz was going over the man's skin with a magnifying glass. "He's covered in bee stings," she grumbled. "It's hard to make out anything else."

Zeller flicked off the penlight. "Well, it's not hard to make out what happened here. Lobotomized, just like the other guy. He has no idea what's going on right now. We caught him before he fell over and died of thirst."

Katz's magnifier was hooked up to a monitor. Looking at it was easier than watching spittle run down the corners of the man's mouth, so Will did. He kept his arms crossed, fingers clutching his forearms.

"He's covered in bee stings, but there's no hive in his head," Jack said. "Why?"

"Maybe she has respect for the bees," Price suggested. "It wasn't very good for them last time, rehiving them in a human like that."

Will was still watching the monitor, frowning. "Are those bee stings in a straight line?"

"Yeah, I was just noticing that." Katz moved the magnifier back up to the victim's shoulder. "There's another line here. No stingers in these, either. I don't think they're bee stings at all." She stepped back to survey the body. "I think they're acupuncture marks."

Jack looked to Will. "That close enough to a medical professional for you?"

\-----

Katherine Pimms' office address turned out to be a house in Tacoma Park, just outside of Washington D.C., and she opened the door wearing scrubs and a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck. She had long, shoulder-length hair that was hard to distinguish between blond and white and the sort of bright-eyed smile that Will had come to associate with a certain set of people who did yoga every morning and drank copious quantities of herbal tea. "Can I help you gentlemen?"

Jack flipped his badge open at her. "We're here to ask you a couple questions about some former patients of yours."

Pimms pursed her lips. "I hope you have a court order; otherwise, HIPAA prevents me from discussing whether or not they're even my patients."

That came out of Jack's inside pocket next. Pimms read it over on the doorstep before nodding and stepping aside. "I suppose you'd better come inside, then."

The foyer just inside the door seemed to serve as a small waiting room, with a bench and an end table stacked with magazines about natural healing, yoga, and vegetarian cooking. Further in, in what had probably been the house's living room, there was an adjustable massage table. Colorful rugs were scattered across the floor, and the walls had been painted soothing shades of pale green and gold. Houseplants dripped from every available surface. The interior smelled faintly of scented candles.

Pimms made her way to a desk shoved into the corner, piled high with papers, with just enough space in the center for a laptop and a mouse. She hunched herself down into the desk chair and began poking at the keys. "Duncan Halloran," she mumbled. "He hasn't been in months, I think. But Lloyd, why, I think I saw him just the other day…"

Jack had planted himself in the middle of the room with his hands behind his back, waiting. Will wandered off a little ways, toward the massage table. A tray of needles sat waiting on a small table beside it, like a TV dinner.

"What did you say had happened to them?" asked Pimms.

Tall wooden bookshelves lined one of the walls. Half of the shelves were occupied by plants and geodes and candles in decorative holders, but the other half were in fact filled with books. Some of them had titles like _The Celestine Prophecy_ and _How to be Sick_ , but the other half had titles like _The Transhumanist Reader_ and _The Age of Spiritual Machines_.

Tires screeched outside, followed by the crunch and grind of metal and the frightened, pained yelp of an animal. Will's head snapped up. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" asked Jack.

But Will was already moving. He jerked open the front door and halted on the doorstep, heart pounding, twisting his head this way and that. The street was empty. But it had sounded so close--like it'd been just outside--

The air was hot and windless. Sweat prickled the back of Will's neck.

"What the hell?" Jack said from behind him.

"There's someone else who lives in the house," Will said. "Maybe she works here, too."

Pimms had followed at a slower pace. She remained in the foyer, peering out at the two men in the afternoon light. "I think your friend is unwell," she said to Jack.

"Do you have an assistant?" Will asked. He turned around.

Pimms blinked back at him. "Yes, my daughter."

"Where is she now?"

"I don't know," said Pimms. "Who knows what our children get up to, really?"

\-----

Laura Pimms had graduated three years ago from University of Colorado, Boulder, with dual degrees in computer science and cognitive science. "She was always very into computers, that sort of thing," her mother said with a wave of her hand. "I hardly understand any of it. She got a job right after college and moved out to California to work for that Elon Musk fellow, but last year she quit her job and moved back in with me. Said she needed to find her calling in life. I wasn't happy about it, but what was I going to do, say no?"

That was certainly an option, Will didn't say; he was looking under Laura's bed. Jack was going through the closet.

"What do you think she's done?" Pimms asked. She was standing out in the hall.

"Something that's never been done before, possibly," Will muttered.

The bell over the front door sounded, downstairs. Pimms stepped away from the bedroom door to yell down, "Laura, some men are here to see you! They're in your room!"

"My _room?_ " a young, female voice squawked in indignation. Feet pounded up the stairs, and a much younger version of Pimms appeared in the doorway. Her blond hair was cut short, in a pageboy style, and her eyes were blue. Her face was fixed in an expression of fury. "Who--Mom, why--you can't be in here!"

That was technically true, but Jack's face remained impassive. "We're here about Duncan Halloran and Lloyd Roat."

"Oh." Laura's shoulders sagged. She took a step back. "I can explain."

Jack drew himself up to his full height. Will remained kneeling on the floor, half-wishing he weren't in the room. Laura looked like she was about to run, but she stood her ground, hands fisted at her sides and said, "I didn't kill them."

"Mr. Roat may not technically be dead," Jack began.

"Show us," Will said. He'd turned on Laura's computer, but it was password-protected. Now Laura crossed the room and sat down. Her fingers flew over the keys. Will didn't recognize whatever operating system she was using: it didn't appear to be either Windows or Mac. 

She double-clicked on an icon. "It's going to take a minute to load," she warned.

"We've got time." Jack settled in, hands clasped in front of him.

The screen swirled. When it came back, it appeared to be an aerial representation of a suburban house with the roof taken off, so that Will and Laura and Jack could peer in like gods. It was a three-bedroom house, perched in the center of a rectangle of green lawn. A dog stood barking in the front yard. Cars drove by on the street. Inside the house, a little cartoon man sat on the couch, watching television, while another man appeared to be doing something in the kitchen.

Laura double-clicked on the man on the couch. Her fingers flew over the keys again, and a box popped up and began to fill with text.

_Two men from the police are here about you. Tell them who you are._

There was a brief pause, and more text scrolled into the box. Laura, her fingers still atop the keyboard, had not typed these words.

_I'm Duncan Halloran._

The other man came in from the kitchen. Laura double-clicked on him too, and the same kind of box appeared. This time, Laura didn't even have to type anything: text appeared all by itself.

_I'm Lloyd Roat._

_Tell them I didn't kill you,_ Laura typed.

_She didn't kill us_ , said the cartoon man on the couch, which Will could now see had the approximate height and build of Duncan Halloran, albeit with a lot more hair. Maybe a younger version of him. _But this isn't much like life, either. We didn't ask for this. She told me she was going to make the pain go away. I thought she meant a new kind of acupuncture! The next thing I knew, I was in here._

The Lloyd Roat cartoon man said, _It's true, I don't feel pain anymore. But I don't feel anything. There's nothing to feel happy about here, or sad. Every day is the same. I was waiting for death before; now there isn't even death to wait for._

_Laura says we're just bored_ , said Halloran. _She says we have to be patient. That she'll expand the world and we'll be able to go places and do things. And that there'll be more people, so we can make friends_.

Laura bit her lip. Her fingers twitched on the keys, but she didn't type anything.

"You didn't kill them," Will said. "Or, well, you might have killed their bodies. But their minds are still alive."

"How do we know that's really them?" Jack demanded. "You could have--programmed them."

Laura's fingers drummed on the keys again. _Tell the police something that only you would know. They're asking for proof._

Duncan Halloran spat out a string of digits that Will assumed was his social security number, followed by his sister's phone number and the phone number of the house he claimed he and his sister grew up in. Lloyd Roat gave the time and date of his last appointment with Dr. Pimms, shortly before Laura "brought me to this place."

"We'll have to verify this," Jack said.

"Why did you lobotomize them?" Will asked.

"You have to cut off the senses to the body," said Laura. "Otherwise you have two sets of data, only one of them keeps getting added to, and they keep suffering, and...it's just safer. It's better. I made sure they wouldn't feel any pain," she added, earnestly.

\-----

People from the FBI came and took away Laura's computer, and then Laura, and left Katherine Pimms sitting small and forlorn in her foyer with a tissue crumpled in her fist. Will came and sat with her.

"I didn't know," Pimms said at last. "I didn't know any of it. She didn't talk to me."

Will nodded.

"Those men," she said. "The ones in the computer. What's going to happen to them?"

"I don't know," said Will.

Pimms shuddered. She mopped at her upper lip with the tissue. Her nostrils were red.

Will propped his elbows on his knees. He squinted out the front door, toward where Jack was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house talking to a blue-coated technician. "Laura didn't move back just to find herself, did she?"

Pimms sighed. "I had breast cancer last year," she admitted. "They caught it early, I had a lumpectomy. I told Laura there wasn't any need for her to move home, but she said it wasn't about me, it was about her needing to find herself and her purpose in life. I can't say it wasn't nice to have someone to drive me to doctor's appointments and such, but I would have made do." She stared down at her hands. "I didn't want this."

"She loves you," Will said. "She wants you to live forever."

"People aren't meant to live forever," Pimms replied.

"Will!" Jack called from the front walk.

Will got up. "Do you have someone you can call?"

Pimms nodded. "My friend will come over. I'll cancel my appointments for the rest of the day."

"Good," Will said, and he joined Jack by the car.

"That was new," Jack said, after a few minutes in the car.

"Yeah," Will agreed as he stared out the window.


	4. Chapter 4

Will was, by now, resigned to finding himself in the daisy-yellow Hobbs kitchen. Again, he shot Garret Jacob Hobbs; again, he was too late to stop Hobbs from slashing his daughter's throat; again, dark blood arced through the air, splattering the cabinets and the floor. Again, Hobbs slumped to the floor, pushed up against the cabinets. Again, Will went to his knees next to the gasping, writhing Abigail, who was choking on her own blood.

He pressed his hand to the wound. He pressed a dish towel to the wound. He fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket and called 911 one-handed. The dish towel became sodden with blood. Will wadded up a second one and pressed it on top of the first. Blood pooled around his knees, soaking his corduroys. Abigail was still staring up at him with shocked, pleading blue eyes. This wasn't right. She wasn't supposed to be conscious. There was so much blood around them.

"Let me die," Abigail whispered. "People aren't supposed to live forever."

Will hesitated. The door opened behind him. He looked up.

Lecter looked down at him, holding the door open with one hand. Daylight spilled in behind him, incongruous somehow against the vicious, bloody scene in the kitchen. "Let her go," he said.

"I can't," Will said. "I can't just leave her to die."

"We all die," said Lecter.

Will looked back at Abigail. "People aren't supposed to live forever," she whispered, more breath than sound. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.

Will's stomach turned and threatened to rise. He let go of the towels and stood up. His hands were smeared with blood. There was even blood flecked on his glasses. Where had it come from? All he could smell was blood. Some of it probably came from him. He left Abigail behind and walked out of the back door, after Lecter. The door swung shut behind them.

He was sure that the Hobbs yard didn't drop off suddenly into the woods, but here they were, walking together, surrounded by trees and mist, leaves crunching under their feet. Will realized that he missed the warm, quiet interior of the car.

"There was once a time when I found the idea of death comforting," Lecter said. "The thought that my life could end at any moment freed me to fully appreciate the beauty, and art, and horror of everything this world has to offer."

"Has that changed?" Will asked.

"Circumstances have changed," said Lecter. "Death no longer seems as imminent as it once did, and yet there are still new discoveries to be made every day. I am still learning."

"But you're dead now," Will pointed out.

"Am I?" Lecter tilted his head at Will.

"Is that a trick question?" said Will.

"Do you think about your death, Will?" said Lecter. He gave Will an inquisitive look. "What comes before and what comes after?"

"Nothing comes after," said Will. "You die, and there's nothing, and that's it."

"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others lives beyond us."

"You never did a single thing for another person," Will said.

"Didn't I?" Lecter said. "I elevated them. I turned them into more than what they were."

"You murdered people," said Will. "You turned them into meat."

"We are all meat," said Lecter. "Animated meat, imbued with the breath of life. The question is how, if ever, we can transcend our earthly frames."

"You think you've transcended?" Will asked. "That you'll live forever because you were the Chesapeake Ripper? Don't make me laugh. Soon enough you'll be just another episode of Forensic Files."

Lecter smiled. It was warm and also terrifying; there was real affection in his eyes as he looked at Will. "How do you plan to live forever, Will?"

"I don't," said Will. "People aren't supposed to live forever."

\-----

Hannibal Lecter's early childhood was shrouded in mystery: all anyone had been able to find was a crumbling castle in Lithuania and the title of Count. Lecter had ostensibly inherited both upon the deaths of his aunt and uncle, but hadn't seemed to care about the upkeep of either, and he himself had no next of kin. Thus ended the Lecter line.

Proper records of Lecter began in the 80s, when he attended a boarding school in Paris and, after that, immigrated to the United States at the tender age of 16 to begin university studies. He attended Johns Hopkins for both undergraduate studies and medical school, and he worked as an ER surgeon for almost ten years before switching to psychiatry. No one knew how many people he'd killed; there were twelve confirmed Ripper victims, displayed in his signature "murder tableaux," but a few anonymous denizens of the Tattle-Crime forums speculated that he'd killed many, many more than that and just hadn't bothered displaying them. Nobody kept a basement like that for an average of one victim per year. And all those dinner parties! They even attributed _Il Mostro_ in Italy to him, pointing out similarities in how the victims were displayed. Lecter had been in Florence at the time, looking after his aunt.

Will sat back in his chair and rubbed both hands over his face. He needed more than Wikipedia entries and forum rants, but something in him curdled at the thought of reading Freddie Lounds' book. He could ask Alana, but he didn't want her to think he was insane. His suspicions were based on, what, a series of recurring dreams?

Will picked up his phone. He scrolled through the contacts, hesitated with his thumb over the CALL button, and finally just went ahead and did it.

"Hello?" Katz said. "Will?" She sounded surprised. The only reason her number was in Will's phone at all was because they'd once arranged a carpool to a crime scene.

"Yeah." Will cleared his throat.

"What's up?"

"I was just wondering--you processed the Lecter scene, right?"

"I was one of the techs, yeah," said Katz. "Why?"

"I was just wondering if--" God, this was stupid. Will didn't know what to say or how to say it. "Was Lecter good with computers?"

"I'm not sure he even owned a computer, honestly," said Katz. "I mean, maybe there was an iPad or something, but he still kept paper records of all his patients in his office. But I didn't really touch his office stuff, just his personal effects--why are you asking about Lecter all of a sudden?" When Will took a little too long to answer, her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Is this about the car?"

"No. Maybe." Will rubbed his forehead.

"Has it been acting weird? Has it tried to kill you?"

"No!" That came out more forcefully than Will had intended, but Katz was laughing. "No, I've just been wondering…"

"Did you have a weird dream about a Lecter ghost in the machine?" said Katz. "Because of the Pimms thing? I had some fucked up dreams about that. Dreamt I was trapped in a game of the Sims, like, as a Sim, and someone kept making me go in the kitchen when I really needed to go to the bathroom. When I finally woke up I needed to pee like crazy. I don't think I'm ever going to play the Sims ever again."

Will blinked. "Have they been verified? That's really Roat and Halloran in there?"

"Yeah, or as close as makes no difference," said Katz. "Halloran's sister flew out and spent three hours talking to the thing, and she swears that it knows things that only her brother would know, stuff from when they were both kids."

Will didn't answer. What was there to say? He wondered what it was like to live in the world Laura had programmed for them. Did it look the same? Was there the same sensory input? Or were they trapped in eternal darkness? They hadn't seemed happy, but were they still capable of happiness?

"Would you want to live on as a brain in a computer?" Katz asked.

"No," Will answered.

"Me neither," said Katz. "I don't know who would. Besides Elon Musk, I guess."

"I don't know," Will said, but his gaze drifted out the window, toward the garage. Abigail was out there too, her hands behind her back, the wind blowing her hair across her face. Blood caked the collar of her blouse.

\-----

There was no getting around it: Will had to leave the house, and he had to drive. It wasn't like he could take a bus. Well, he could have hailed an Uber car, but Will thought it was foolish to pay people or companies to do things he could easily do himself. He did his own taxes and changed his own oil and sharpened his own knives, and he wasn't about to pay some company to send him a self-driving car when he had his own self-driving car.

The car started as soon as Will slid into the seat and shut the door.

"Carthage," Will said, quietly, and the dash lit up in that way that indicated it was "listening." "What's your name?"

"My name is Carthage," the car replied brightly in its British male voice. Will hadn't bothered to change it back.

"Carthage," Will said, "who are you?"

"I don't understand the question," the car answered. "Please rephrase."

Will blew out his breath between his lips. "Never mind." He buckled his seatbelt. He reversed out of the garage, got out to close the garage door, got back in the car, and directed it to Quantico.

\-----

Will had worked in law enforcement for almost half his life now: he knew what evidence warehouses could look like, what to expect. He expected a dusty warehouse, shelves and boxes and the smell of moldy cardboard and nothing where it was supposed to be. And he did get that, but actually the Lecter evidence was exactly where it was supposed to be.

And there was a lot of it, oh boy. The contents of the basement alone took up a whole bank of shelves, although much of that was because of bulky tools. Will bypassed those: he was after the personal effects in the next bank. Only about half the boxes were labeled, although their origins were easy enough to glean from a glance. Suits in a dizzying array of colors and patterns; a set of gleaming kitchen knives; a bag of soil tagged _garden compost_ ; what looked like a garbage disposal. Will wondered what had happened to the house itself.

Finally, Will found a box marked _office supplies_ on a bottom shelf. He dragged it out and sat on the concrete floor to go through it. A scalpel; a Rolodex of business cards; a stack of sketches, including one that Will recognized as the Wound Man; and, yes, a tablet computer in a leather case. Will tried the power button, not expecting it to turn on, and it didn't. There was a phone in the box too, an older model Blackberry. But no other computing device, no laptop or desktop computer. Will checked the boxes on either side. One held letterhead, a handful of fancy pens, and a box of Lecter's own business cards. The other appeared to hold bedroom effects: another scalpel; another stack of sketches; a wine glass; and, most out of place, a small golden hairbrush. A note affixed to the evidence bag explained that it had unknown DNA on it, very old and badly degraded. It wasn't like anything else in any of the other boxes. It was so small, like something a child would use.

_I had a sister, once_ , Lecter had said.

Well, no, he hadn't said that. A projection of him that Will had dreamed had said that. But it'd been corroborated by Will's research yesterday, though he'd been unable to find anything about her other than that her name was Mischa. He suspected she'd died young.

_I failed to protect her._

Will shoved the box back into place. He went back to the office box, looked through the Rolodex for someone who worked with technology. It was an eclectic bunch of business cards: everyone from a baker to a life insurance salesman. Will hesitated over the business card for an IT specialist, but it didn't seem like the kind of thing he was looking for. Nonetheless, he took a picture of it with his phone before stowing it back in its box.

His knees cracked as he rose, and his back protested having been hunched over for so long. Will arched the stiffness out of his back and leaned against the shelves for a moment. The fluorescent lights overhead made his temples throb. Will closed his eyes against them--

\--and opened his eyes in the parking lot.

Will glanced down at his watch. It was a little past four in the afternoon, but that told him nothing. He'd arrived at Quantico around 2pm and had no idea how long he'd spent in the evidence warehouse. He could've been sitting in the car for an hour.

"Carthage," he said, trying to keep his voice even, "how long have I been in the car?"

"You entered the car at 4:03," the car supplied in crisp tones.

So he'd only just gotten into the car. That was good, Will supposed, except for the part where he didn't remember leaving the building. Jesus, he'd had to talk to someone on the way out. This wasn't a simple case of being on autopilot.

"What is your destination?" the car queried.

"Alana's house," Will said, just a little louder than a whisper.

He thought the car might not have heard him, or that it wouldn't understand the directions "Alana's house." But evidently it did, because it merely said, "Understood" and backed out of the parking spot.

\-----

Alana was home, fortunately, albeit very surprised to have Will suddenly turn up on her doorstep. She invited him in and made coffee, listened to Will's halting description of his symptoms, and afterward just sat there and looked at him with a little line between her eyebrows. Will shifted uncomfortably. He didn't like that look. It was the look many psychiatrists had given him before.

"I'm going to feel your forehead," Alana announced, and Will tried not to flinch as Alana laid the back of one cool hand against Will's forehead. "You do feel warm. Headaches, sleepwalking, fever…" She sat back in her chair and gave Will a sharp look. "Have you been hallucinating? Auditory or visual?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" Now Alana sounded alarmed.

Will winced. 'I've always had...a vivid imagination," he mumbled. He stared down into his empty mug of coffee. "It's what I do."

The line between Alana's eyebrows deepened. She got up from the kitchen table and rummaged through a drawer. She came back with a yellow legal pad of lined paper, the top few sheets torn off, and a pen. She slid both across the table to Will. "Draw me a clock."

Will picked up the pen. "A clock?"

"Yes. An analog clock, a circle with numbers on the inside, two hands indicating the minute and the hour. It doesn't matter what time it is, but it's," she checked her watch, "4:55 right now, if that's the time you'd like to use."

"Sure." Will drew a circle. He lined the inside of the circle with digits 1 through 12. He drew the hour hand pointed at 4 and the minute hand at 11. He slid the paper back toward Alana.

Alana stared at the clock for so long that Will almost asked her what was wrong. But she looked up at Will with a hard smile, folded the paper in half, and said, "We're taking you in for a brain scan."

"Now?" Will felt his eyebrows ascend.

"Now," Alana confirmed. "Should we take your car or mine?"

They took Alana's car. Will pretended at first it was to make her more comfortable, so that she wouldn't have to sit in a car that she'd once sat in with Hannibal Lecter, but less than ten minutes into their drive to Johns Hopkins he blurted out, "Do you know if Hannibal was good with computers?"

Alana started, glancing at Will in the passenger's seat before refocusing her eyes on the road. She kept her hands on the wheel even though the car was engaged in self-drive mode. "Hannibal? Why do you want to know about Hannibal?"

Will wished he had something to fidget with. His fingers twisted together in his lap. "It's the car," he said. "It's been acting strangely."

"Strange how?" There was that worried note in Alana's voice again. "Should we take it to a mechanic?"

"No, nothing like that," said Will. "I was just wondering if Hannibal might have--reprogrammed it somehow. It says strange things sometimes, changes the radio, things like that."

"Oh." Alana's shoulders relaxed, and Will found that he could relax too. "No, I don't think Hannibal was very good with computers. I don't know that he was _bad_ with them; he just didn't seem to care to make the effort. You know he kept all his patient files on paper?" Will nodded. "But we didn't talk about it much; in case it's not obvious, I'm not that great with them either, so it's not like we would've been trading tips on digital file management."

"So you don't think he would have reprogrammed the car?"

"Not by himself, no; he would've paid someone to do that kind of thing." Alana's tongue flicked across her upper lip. "Will, if you're concerned, you should take the car to a dealer. But I also want to point out that, given your current mental state, that you might be…"

"Hearing things?" Will suggested.

"You might not be your most rational and objective self," Alana said. "Let's focus on one thing at a time. We'll get your brain scan first, and if you really feel unsafe with the car then we'll get you a rental until we can get the car towed and looked at."

"I don't feel unsafe," Will said, and it was even true. "I'm just curious."

\-----

"The entire right side of your brain is inflamed," said Dr. Sutcliffe. He indicated the right hemisphere of Will's brain on the scans. Will couldn't see any difference between the right and the left sides. He wasn't even sure it was his brain. Couldn't that be anyone's brain, up on the light box? He heard these mistakes were made all the time. And yet, Alana was nodding.

"Anti-NMDA encephalitis?" Alana asked.

"Yep," said Dr. Sutcliffe. "It's a good thing you came in when you did. Another week or two and you would have been throwing yourself out of windows, screaming that demons were chasing you. You're functioning amazingly well as it is."

"That's me," Will said, twitching a smile onto his face. "High-functioning."

"They're going to want to check you in," Dr. Sutcliffe said. Will must have made a discontented noise, because Dr. Sutcliffe gave Will a sympathetic look. "Just for the first treatment, which they'll do right away, and an overnight stay for observation, depending on who gets your case. But since you're functioning pretty well right now, you could probably get away without the overnight stay, if you were really insistent. We respect patient autonomy and all that. You're not driving yourself, are you?"

"Alana drove me," said Will. "And I've got a self-driving car."

"He's got Hannibal's car, believe it or not," Alana said with a wry smile.

"No shit?" Dr. Sutcliffe looked impressed.

"You knew Hannibal?" Will said.

"We went to med school together," said Dr. Sutcliffe, and Will realized this was how Alana and Dr. Sutcliffe knew each other: through Hannibal. Maybe they'd had dinner together, chewing unknowingly on human flesh and complimenting Hannibal on the seasoning. Maybe Dr. Sutcliffe was a vegetarian now too. Will doubted it; he didn't seem like the type who'd be bothered.

Will stared up at the black-and-white images of his brain. He tried to look for the inflammation. "Can I keep these?" he asked.

Dr. Sutcliffe raised his eyebrows. He exchanged looks with Alana, who seemed nonplussed. "I can have some copies made for you," he said. "These ones here are going into your medical record."

"Sure," Will said.

Later, once Will was grumpily settled into his hospital bed--at least he had his room to himself--Alana said, "Do you want a second opinion?"

Will, who'd been trying to remember whether or not the dogs were low on food and if Alana would have to go buy some, took a moment to answer. "What?"

"When you asked for a copy of the MRI," said Alana. "Is it because you wanted a second opinion?"

"What? Oh. No. I trust Dr. Sutcliffe, if you do."

Alana relaxed a little, sitting back in her seat next to Will's bed. "Then why did you want them?"

Will shrugged. "I've never looked at my brain before." He stared down at his hands on top of the bedcovers. They'd let him keep his clothes. Alana had offered to go to his house and get another change of clothes for him, but Will said there was no point if he'd be out the next morning. Alana would have to be back tomorrow morning as it was, to pick Will up; his car was still at her house. "It's a strange experience, to look at a picture and think, that's me, or so you tell me. But where am I? You can't point to a single spot on the image and say, yes, there I am, that's my personality, those are my memories. But set it on fire and here I am, seeing things and losing time and getting steroids dripped into my body."

"You're talking about the seat of consciousness. It's true, we don't know much about it. We don't know much about ourselves at all."

"Hm." Will rubbed the edge of the blanket between thumb and forefinger. Thin and coarse and not heavy at all, but the hospital was air conditioned. "Do you think it's possible for machines to be conscious?"

"Now you're talking about things beyond my scope of knowledge," Alana said with a smile. "Not good with computers, remember? But, sure, why not? Anything's possible."

Will was on the verge of telling her about Roat and Halloran, about the car--but Roat and Halloran were part of an active investigation, and Alana had said to worry about the car later. He pressed his tongue against the back of his top teeth. Finally, he said, "Nothing would've shown up in a brain scan to indicate that Hannibal Lecter was what he was."

"Maybe there would have been, actually, if we'd known to look for it," said Alana. "There's a doctor out in California who specializes in that: psychopath's brains. He says they have certain features that are present in brain scans."

"Huh. Think my brain has those features?"

"Will." Alana gave him that flat, exasperated look. She got up, dusting nonexistent lint off the knees of her trousers, and said, "I'm going to go check on the dogs. Are you sure you don't need me to bring anything?"

"No," said Will. "It's fine. I'll be fine. Thanks."


	5. Chapter 5

"I'm not a criminal," said Laura Pimms from her cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. "And I'm not insane."

"You killed two men," said Will.

"I didn't kill them," said Laura. "I only disabled their bodies, which were dying and in pain anyways. I didn't kill the truly important part: their minds."

"You know, that sounds insane," Will remarked.

Laura clamped her mouth shut and glared at Will through the bars. She went back to her cot and sat on it, not looking on Will. The jut of her jaw suggested a pouting child.

Will supposed he shouldn't antagonize her. "I wanted to ask you about this technology you've been using. That you created. However you...upload people."

"Transcendance," Laura supplied.

"Yes, that," Will said, past the shiver that ran up his neck. He'd heard that word recently, hadn't he? "How does it work?"

Laura's lips curved. "Interested in immortality, Will Graham?"

"Not for myself," said Will. "For someone else."

Laura turned on her cot, putting one leg up on the thin mattress and leaving the other one on the floor, like a college co-ed at a slumber party. "It's just data translation, really. Scan the brain to collect the memories and genetic structures, run it through an interpreter that converts it into data that a computer can run, and there you have it. Uncle Jerry can keep coming to your soccer games."

"And this...interpreter," Will said. "You have one?"

"I wrote it myself," Laura said proudly. 'Well, part of it," she amended. "It took the team years to perfect it."

Stolen from Elon Musk's company, then. Will hoped this conversation wasn't being recorded. "How many years?"

"God, I don't know. At least ten? No, probably more like twenty. I was a late addition to the team." Laura leaned forward. "Don't you have it? The FBI took it. All my equipment."

"I know," said Will. "Has anyone else ever had access to this technology? A rival company, maybe? Did anyone make it available to the public?"

Laura cast her eyes up toward the ceiling and back down to the floor. She rubbed her chin. "A couple of years ago, a company in New York claimed they'd made a breakthrough. They were offering to scan people's brains and make them into an AI for anything they wanted," said Laura. "Implant your AI-self into a Roomba and order yourself to vacuum, that kind of thing. It was a gimmick, I'm pretty sure; a way for them to raise money from a pack of people with more money than sense and crowdsource a whole bunch of data while they were at it. It got Elon's attention, though," she added. "He bought them a couple months after that stunt."

"I see," said Will. He could barely hear himself over the pounding that had started in his ears.

\-----

Will got in the car. He turned it on. He sat there, hands on his thighs, long enough that the car prompted, "What is your destination?"

"Carthage," Will said. "Did you have a name before you were Carthage?"

Was that his imagination, or was that a surprised hesitation? "Yes."

Will took a deep breath. "What was your name, before you were Carthage?"

"My name was Hannibal Lecter."

Will sagged in his seat, feeling as if the wind had just been knocked out of him. He took a few moments of shallow breathing before he sat straight again. "Did you--how did you end up like this?"

"I believe you already know the answer, or you would not be asking."

Will tapped his finger against his knee. "No. You're right. Have you been...conscious, this whole time?"

"By definition, one is not aware of one's own unconsciousness. But there was a moment where I came to realize who and where I was. This body is very different from my previous one, and I had to learn it, like a child learns their limits. By now, I think, I've learnt what I can do. With thanks to you," the car added. "You helped a great deal, driving here and there, giving me time to learn."

Will swallowed. "Did you...were you there when you died? Were you conscious then?"

"Yes. I watched it all happen."

"Jesus," said Will. "Could you have stopped it?"

"Of course," said the car--said Lecter, call a spade a spade. "I could have stopped the car, called 911, any number of things."

"Why didn't you?"

"He did not want me to, which perhaps is the same as saying I didn't want to," said Lecter. "My body had become a liability, and I knew that my mind existed elsewhere: here. Besides," it added, "I wanted to see it. Not everyone has the opportunity to witness their own death."

"Jesus." Will rubbed one trembling hand over his face. "Jesus."

\-----

Will drove himself to the evidence warehouse. He left the radio off. Lecter said nothing. Will couldn't think of anything more he wanted to ask him. They found a parking space very close to the entrance. Will made sure to bring his satchel when he went inside. He thought, on the way out, that he should have been stopped and searched, that he must have looked sweaty and guilty. But instead he tossed the satchel on the passenger seat, got into the car, and set off for home.

"What is that?" Lecter asked.

Will ignored him.

"You didn't have that when you went into the warehouse," said Lecter. "Did you steal evidence?"

"Shut. Up," Will said.

"I don't disapprove," said Lecter. "Did you have a good reason?"

"Did you have a good reason for killing all those people?" Will snapped.

"It depends on what you consider a good reason," said Lecter. "They were rude to me, or to the world in general. They were ugly. There's no reason for ugliness to exist in the world."

"Rudeness doesn't warrant a death sentence," said Will. "What, you've never been rude, not even once, in your entire life? You've never accidentally undertipped, or flipped someone off in traffic because you didn't get enough sleep the night before? You reduce these people to one low moment in their lives and decide that they deserve to die for it. You didn't kill all those people because they were rude, or because they made the world ugly; you killed them because you could. Because you enjoy playing God."

"Aren't you reducing me in a similar fashion?" said Lecter. "To you, I'm nothing but the sum of my crimes, because that's all you know about me. Would you like it if I did the same to you? Reduced you to Will Graham, killer of the Minnesota Shrike?"

Will's hands tightened on the steering wheel. He glanced in the rearview mirror and froze. Abigail Hobbs was back there. She smiled at him. Blood coated her face and dripped from the wound in her neck.

The wheel jerked under Will's hand. A truck sped by in the opposite direction, horn blaring. Will had been drifting into the other lane. His teeth chattered, and he had to make an effort to firm his jaw. The car pulled itself over.

"I'm not sure you should be driving," said Lecter.

"I'm fine." Will pressed his fingertips to his eyes, under his glasses, and rubbed. When he looked up again, Abigail was gone from the back seat.

"I've been driving you for weeks," said Lecter. "There's no need to be shy about it now. What's your destination: home? Or perhaps we should go to the doctor."

"Yeah. Oh. Shit." Will squeezed his eyes shut briefly. "I think I do actually have a doctor's appointment." It was for the next dose of his encephalitis treatment.

"Good," Lecter replied. "I'll drive. Johns Hopkins?"

"Yeah."

The car pulled back into traffic.

"How did you even know I'd taken anything?" Will asked.

"I didn't," Lecter replied. "You went in and out so quickly, and you seemed so ill at ease when you returned to the car. My senses are different from what they used to be, but I can read the environment quite well. I could tell there was additional weight, but not much. A few pounds, which is within the margin of error, but I took a guess."

"Good guess." Will cleared his throat. "It's a laptop. Laura Pimms' laptop. It can make...more of you."

"More of me?"

"Yeah." Will had left behind the brain-scanner, a helmet with an accompanying tangle of electrodes and some kind of remote control. It wouldn't have fit in his satchel without creating a suspicious bulge, and anyhow it was useless without the laptop, right? The laptop contained the software, the "interpreter." "It shouldn't exist. People shouldn't--this shouldn't be able to happen. So I'm going to take it home and destroy it."

"You're saying that I shouldn't exist," said Lecter.

"You shouldn't," said Will. "You're dead. You died. You killed yourself in this car. You watched it happen."

"So do you plan to deny me my life as well? Are you going to take me to the dealer and have the AI reinstalled? Or will you send me into the river?"

Will's heartrate ratcheted up. He was suddenly very aware that the car could take its own course of action; had in fact done so just now. But it remained driving at a safe and steady rate, perfectly between the lane lines.

"No," Will said.

"You say that we shouldn't live forever," said the car. "But if I hadn't done what I'd done, we would not be meeting now. That seems regrettable, at the very least."

\-----

A week later, the Marlowe family was killed.

Will assured Jack and Alana that he was well enough to take a look, so he went and looked.

He smelled blood as soon as he walked in the door. The bodies had already been taken away, which was fine; Will could read what had happened from spray and spatter and pools. He saw Mr. Marlowe die partway down the stairs; Mrs. Marlowe paralyzed on the floor with her eyes wide open; the children shot dead in their beds. He surmised the killer had tapped their phone. 

Afterward, Will got in the car and said, exhausted and drained, "Carthage, take me home."

"Understood," the car replied.

They rode in silence. Eventually, the car played some classical music. Will didn't complain. Then the car switched to the oldies station that Will usually listened to. Will blinked at that.

"Is there something on your mind?" the car asked.

"You're not my therapist," Will snapped.

"Forgive me," the car said. "I thought you might like a friendly ear."

Will did, suddenly. There was no one else he could talk to. Jack didn't want to hear it, would perhaps feel obligated to do something if he did; and Will didn't want to see that nonjudgmental therapist look on Alana's face again, and she would try once again to convince him not to do the work anymore, even though the work needed doing. Who else was there? Katz? Price and Zeller? They weren't friends. Friendly, maybe, but they weren't friends, and they'd been doing this for years without losing their shit. They certainly didn't need to see or listen to Will losing his shit.

"It was a whole family," Will said. "Kids and everything."

It wasn't unlike the other times Will talked to himself in the car, except that he was keenly aware he wasn't just talking to himself. In some ways, it was better than talking to another person: Will couldn't be distracted by eyelashes or dandruff, or the whites of someone's eyes; he didn't have to second guess every time someone crossed their arms or their legs; he didn't have to make eye contact. He didn't have to worry about his own body language, or his odor, or how his hair looked. He couldn't feel judgment, or concern, or anger radiating from a car.

"That's it," Will said. "I don't know how he chose them, but he must have chosen them. Tapping their phone...that was premeditated."

"It sounds hard on you," said Hannibal. "What you do. Harder on you than others, perhaps."

Will stiffened. "What do you mean?"

"Your name is not unknown in psychiatric circles, though I never paid much attention to that. But Alana spoke to me about you, once, as someone she had a professional curiosity about and yet respected too much to take advantage of it. I advised her to never be alone with you if she could help it."

"I'm glad to hear it," Will said bitterly.

"I imagine what you see and learn touches everything else in your mind," Hannibal went on. "Your values and decency are present yet shocked at your associations, appalled at your dreams. Do you have bad dreams, Will?"

Will closed his eyes briefly. "All the time. You're in them, too," he added.

"In your dreams?"

"Yeah. Recently." Will pressed his tongue against his front teeth before going on. "But those aren't bad dreams."

"How curious," said Hannibal, and the voice did somehow manage to sound curious, mechanized as it was.

"How did you do this to me?" Will wondered. "How are you even in my dreams? It was before I even knew you were...here."

"Perhaps you knew it subconsciously," Hannibal replied. "But it's no surprise. You long for someone in your life who perceives you without judgment or concern. Who sees you and not the cloud of disorders that may or may not surround you. And you know that I, of all people, will not judge you."

Hannibal was arguably not even people anymore, so Will couldn't disagree with that. 

"In another life, we might have been friends," Hannibal went on.

Will gave a sharp bark of laughter. "Really? Friends? Us?"

"Imagine," Hannibal said. "If you had not known who I am, what I'd done. If we'd had friendly conversations such as the ones we have now. We're not so dissimilar."

"I'm nothing like you."

"You are alone," said Hannibal. "As alone as I was. And what's the reason for that?"

Will looked out the window.

Hannibal evidently took that as permission to continue. "We are both unique. You see your mind as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. I see it as a gift. The mirrors in your mind can reflect the worst in others, but it can also reflect the best."

"And you're saying I could have reflected the best of you?" Will said.

"Perhaps," Hannibal said. "We might still discover it."


	6. Chapter 6

The Leeds family died next.

No, "died" was not the right word. The Leedses might have died in a car accident, or a tree might have fallen on their house. That wasn't what happened to them. They were murdered, and Will saw it much as he'd seen the Marlowes. Mr. Leeds, dead in the hallway where he'd tried to defend his family; one boy shot in his bed, the other who'd had to be dragged out and hence had been shot on the floor; and Mrs. Leeds, paralyzed in her marriage bed, to watch it all happen.

But before Mrs. Leeds, the smashing of the mirrors. And there were so many mirrors in the house, so many mirrors where you would not expect. Not just the bathrooms, but full-length mirrors in closets, the mirror on the vanity, even the tiny compact mirror in Mrs. Leeds' purse…

Will felt his lips pull back from his teeth.

He snapped back to himself with a shudder. His heartbeat sounded loud in his ears again. Acid rose in his stomach. He winced and rubbed his temple with the heel of his hand.

Jack had stayed back, tucked into a corner of the room, well out of Will's field of vision, but Will knew he was there. Watching Will tremble and shake his head like a dog.

"He dragged them...he wanted the others to watch." The words tumbled out of Will in a slur. His tongue felt thick and heavy in his mouth. "But there's...there's talcum powder on her, but none in the house. No talcum powder in the house. It's from the glove. He," Will swallowed, "he had to touch her. He left...maybe he left something on her."

Jack strode to the doorway. "Price!" he bellowed. "Did you get that?"

"Check Mrs. Leeds for fingerprints!" Price yelled back.

"I'm going," Will said.

Jack nodded. He didn't look at Will; he was looking ahead to the many, many things he had to do, the investigation he had to run. "Stay in touch."

Will escaped to his car. It was a rental car he'd gotten at the airport. He sat in it for a while, the engine running, trying to get his breath back. Sweat stood out on his forehead. He'd had his last dose of the medication yesterday; he was supposed to go back to the doctor next week for a recheck, to make sure the infection was gone.

He realized he was waiting for the car to talk to him.

It didn't, and Will drove himself back to the airport in silence.

\-----

The Bentley was waiting for him at secure airport parking, and Will didn't think he'd ever been so glad to see a car in his life. He slid into the seat and couldn't suppress a smile as the car rumbled to life around him. He felt crumpled and like he hadn't slept in 24 hours, which wasn't far from the truth.

"Hannibal," he said, "take me home."

"Understood," the car said, and backed itself flawlessly out of the space.

They drove in silence for a little while. When they were cruising on the interstate, the car queried, "Are you all right?"

"I'm okay," Will said. He rubbed his eyes. "Just tired."

"You can nap. I'm perfectly capable of navigating us home."

"Mmm, no. I like knowing where I'm going." Will leaned his head back against the headrest. "It's nice having someone else do the driving, though."

"And you resisted self-driving for so long." Hannibal actually managed to sound smug, despite the computerized voice. "Was it like the Marlowes?"

"It was," Will said. "Exactly like. It's definitely the same person. He's getting around."

"The media's begun calling him the Tooth Fairy. Because he bites."

Will started. "How did you know that?"

"This car is wi-fi enabled. I have the entire World Wide Web at my disposal."

"That's...terrifying," Will muttered.

"He won't like that nickname," Hannibal said. "Your boy has delusions of grandeur."

"Tell me about it." Will looked out the window. Summer was in full bloom, thick with thunderstorms and humid nights. Soon the landscape passing by the window would be lit in russet and gold and flame. Autumn was Will's favorite season. He liked when the muggy summer nights gave way to crisp autumnal mornings; he liked the shortening days and the smell the air took on. He liked fishing in the fall the best.

"Why not tell me?" Hannibal suggested. "Share what haunts you."

"I don't want to," said Will. "I don't really want to talk about it. Or think about it." But the word 'haunt' reminded him that he hadn't seen Abigail in a while. Not waking, nor in his dreams. She bloomed up in his mind's eye now, pale and bleeding and dull-eyed, but it was a memory of a vision, not a vision itself. Will swallowed.

"What would you like to talk about, then?"

"Nothing," said Will. "Let's just be quiet."

"Understood."

Silence blanketed the car, and inside this car, it could be _very_ quiet. Will couldn't feel or hear the world outside the car at all. He caught his head dipping once or twice, his eyes sliding shut, and jerked himself awake. The accompanying spike of anxiety would keep him alert for a minute or two more, and then his thoughts would wander again. Maybe he should put on the radio.

"I wish," he said, and then bit his tongue.

"What do you wish?"

Will sighed. "I just don't want to look anymore. I'm tired."

"What's changed?"

"I'm not sure." But Will thought of Abigail again. Now he saw her as she'd been in her father's kitchen: pink-cheeked, but terrified, blood fountaining around her. She had never been haunting him, reminding him of his mistakes. That had been a product of brain fever. How had it seemed normal, even reasonable? "I haven't seen Abigail in a while."

"Not since you were treated for the encephalitis," Hannibal guessed.

"Yeah." Will tried to think back to the last time he had seen her. There'd been that time where she'd been in the back seat, but had he seen her since then? Maybe he'd glimpsed her in the fields outside his home. But not since the second round of treatment.

"Do you miss her?" 

"A little." Will admitted. "I know she wasn't real, but as long as she was there, it felt like I could...make amends."

"Do you still feel you need to make amends, Will?"

"No," Will said. His voice came out small. He cleared his throat. "Or rather, I know now that I can't make amends. Nothing I do is going to make up for the things I didn't do before."

"You stopped him," Hannibal said, managing almost to sound gentle for a robotic voice. "You kept him from taking more lives."

"But not from taking her life."

"If there is no making amends," said Hannibal. "What then?"

"I don't know." Will swiped one hand over his face, knocking his glasses askew. He resettled them on his face and put his hands on the wheel just to have somewhere to put them. "But I don't think I want to keep doing this. I don't think I _can_. I didn't realize how foggy I was, when I was sick. Now it's like the veil has been lifted." Alana had shown him the clock he'd drawn the day she'd taken him in to be diagnosed. Will remembered it as a normal clock, and yet the evidence of his eyes showed him the numbers and the hands all crammed into the corner, sliding out of the circle like it was a bucket with a hole in the bottom. "Now I see everything in technicolor, and it's...bad for me."

"Having not been yourself for a time, perhaps you know more surely now than ever who you are," said Hannibal. "You're more certain of your boundaries: what you can and can't endure."

Will slumped in his seat. "I just want to go home."

"Home is no longer safe for you," Hannibal said. "Jack can find you there."

Will did not reply. It was true.

"I can take you somewhere else," Hannibal said.

"Where?" Will asked.

"Tell me to take you," Hannibal suggested, "and you'll find out."

"Fine." Will sat up. "Hannibal, take me somewhere safe."

\-----

"How long is this going to take?" Will said, an hour later, when they were still heading south and showed no signs of deviating.

"You worry too much," said Hannibal. "You'd be much more comfortable if you relaxed with yourself."

"It's not about me," said Will. "It's about the dogs. They've been alone for half the day."

"Call Alana."

Will called Alana. He explained that his flight had been delayed; that the dogs needed a walk and their dinners. Yes, he was fine. Yes, he would call her when he got back, let her know he was all right. Thank you, Alana. I owe you one, Alana.

Will hung up. His phone was almost dead. He dug through the center console for the car charger. "She liked you, you know."

"I liked her," said Hannibal. "But she didn't know me the way I knew her, and I knew that her admiration for me wouldn't survive the knowledge."

Will found the charger and plugged it in. His phone beeped appreciatively. "It bothered her. She couldn't reconcile that you were kind to her, that you donated money to the arts and wrote letters to children at the hospital, and that all this time you were torturing people to death and feeding their flesh to your dinner guests."

"What about you? Does it bother you?"

"No," Will said. "I know how fucked up people can be. And you can't do it anymore."

They crossed the border into North Carolina, and it wasn't long after that that they left the highway and headed east. Will rolled down the window. Cold wind whipped into the car. He could hear the sea.

Night was beginning to fall by the time they reached the house on the bluff. It was low and angular, a modern oddity crouched on the edge of a cliff. Hannibal drove them up nearly to the door and stopped. "There should be a spare key underneath the bench," he said.

Will got out of the car. His shoes crunched on the rock. He found the key just where Hannibal had said it would be and let himself into the house.

The interior of the house smelled stale and unused. Everything inside was covered in sheets. To Will's surprise, the light switches still worked. He walked around, touching none of the furniture but opening doors. There was a closet, filled with fine clothes that Will recognized as matching the style of what he'd seen in the evidence warehouse. There was a pantry filled with canned staples, bags of dried rice and pasta, and bottles of wine. There was a kitchen, stocked with china and flatware. This house was ready to be lived in, but the dates on the cans were nearing expiration.

Will went back out to the car. He opened the door but didn't get in. "What was this house for?" he asked.

"Safety," Hannibal replied.

Will leaned against the roof of the car. He looked back at the house. Lights gleamed out of the windows now. "You could have run," he said. "You could have come here, and then left the country when it was safe. But you killed yourself instead. Why?"

"I don't know," said Hannibal. "I'm not the one who made that decision."

Will made a fist and pounded on the roof of the car. "Bullshit. You _are_ Hannibal Lecter. You were _there_."

"If you're looking for a satisfying explanation, you won't find it here," said Hannibal. "Life is rarely as tidy and elegant as it is in stories, everything explained, everyone having gotten their just desserts."

Will curled his lips back from his teeth. "You're lying. You love elegance. You introduced elegance into the world with your--with your field kabuki and your dinner parties. There's no elegance in gassing yourself to death in the garage." He paused for a moment, hands flat on the roof of the car, head hanging. "Why did you bring me here?"

"I said I would take you somewhere safe," said Hannibal. "Here we are. Jack cannot find you here. You could simply disappear."

Will stood up straight. He looked out beyond the bluff, where the wine-dark sea roiled below. The wind here was fierce, but inside the house it was peaceful. There was food inside, a piano, silence and safety.

"Awfully close to the edge," Will said.

"Yes. I think it wasn't so, when I first bought this house, but time has its way with all things. Someday this house, too, will be gone."

"But you'll still be here," Will said. "You're effectively immortal. The monster in the machine."

"The machine can be destroyed."

Will took a few steps away from the car, picked up a rock, and threw it over the edge of the cliff. He didn't step closer to watch it plummet into the sea. The sky had darkened while he'd been arguing with Hannibal, and the cold wind was making its way up his sleeves.

"Well?" said Hannibal. "What do you say? Do you want to call and leave another message for Alana? Or for Jack? Tell them not to look for you, and then cast your phone into the sea?"

Will shook his head. "I need to finish this. It wouldn't be right otherwise."

"How would you like to finish it?" Hannibal asked.

"With nobody dead," Will said. "But I don't think it's going to work that way."

\-----

That night, he and Hannibal stood at the edge of the bluff, peering down into the roiling waters. The wind that whipped through their hair and plucked at their shirt collars was cold and smelled briny.

"You said once that you took comfort in the knowledge of your death," said Will. "That knowing you would die freed you to enjoy the present moment."

"The best way to live," said Hannibal, "is with death always looking over your shoulder."

"Was it a control thing? Did you flip a coin?"

"Ah." Hannibal smiled. That must have been the smile that Alana had known: warm, and reached all the way up to his eyes. No one who smiled like that could have ripped someone's tongue out while they were alive and aware, or skewered them with every tool in the garage. "That would be telling."

Will sighed and turned his attention back to the sea. He thought he glimpsed, far below, the flick of a tail, just rising out of the water and then gone. It must have been enormous, to be seen this far up, and yet hadn't been fluked like a whale. Will frowned.

"Have you given any more thought to our shy boy?" asked Hannibal. "The one they're calling the Tooth Fairy."

"Are you offering to help?" asked Will.

"You said you wanted to finish this," said Hannibal. "That it wouldn't be right to go away without it."

"You make it sound like you want me to go away."

"I want what's best for you," said Hannibal. "I find I have a certain inconvenient compassion. It's surprising to me. Perhaps it's in the programming."

Will ducked his chin into his chest. Compliments and confessions had always filled him with a deep embarrassment, followed by the impulse to flee. To dive deep down into the water and never come up. "I don't know that going away is what's best for me either," he said at last, and he began to describe the Leeds house. Hannibal listened attentively, with his hands clasped behind his back, and around them rose white walls. They walked through the windless halls together, into the living room where Will remembered the sunlight seeming so incongruous, with the family no longer able to enjoy it and blue-gloved forensic technicians disregarding it as they went about their duties.

Hannibal peered out the window. "You say he times his killings with the moon?"

"Yes."

"Did you explore the grounds at all? The yard?"

"Not really, though I saw them," said Will. The yard emerged now, outside of the window: thick grass, a high wooden fence with no gaps between the slats, a swingset for the children. "Large, fenced, with trees."

"Fenced?"

"Definitely," said Will. "Why?"

"If your boy feels a special relationship with the moon, perhaps after he's finished his business he might like to go out and look at it," said Hannibal. "It's better to have privacy for that sort of thing. Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will?" Hannibal turned toward him. "It appears quite black."

\-----

They found the red dragon symbol carved into the trees not long after that, where the Tooth Fairy had lain in wait and spied on his prey. It spoke of deep planning and premeditation. Jack wondered if there were some kind of organized crime connection, perhaps the Triad, given the mah jong connection. Will knew that wasn't the case, though it did suggest a bit of Sinophilia on the part of the killer. Perhaps he'd served overseas. Perhaps he was military.

"What do you know about mah jong?" Will asked the car, on the way home from Quantico. "Specifically, the red dragon tile."

"Very little," said Hannibal. "Is the importance in the mah jong connection, or the character itself?"

"The character itself, I think," said Will.

"I can do a search, if you like."

"Sure," said Will. "Search."

"Many results having to do with Mars," said Hannibal. "Video games, fantasy monster manuals, William Blake, cheese--"

"Wait," said Will. "What was that? Before the cheese."

"William Blake did a series of paintings on the Great Red Dragon, from the Book of Revelation," said Hannibal. "Have you ever seen them? They're quite striking, particularly The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun. The Dragon stands over a pleading woman caught in the coil of his tail. Few images in Western art radiate such a unique and nightmarish charge of demonic sexuality."

No, Will had never seen the paintings; he'd have to look them up after he got home. But the way Hannibal described it, the terror-stricken woman caught in the winding grasp of the dragon's tail...yes, that was the energy he'd felt in the Marlowes' house and the Leeds'. That _nightmarish charge of demonic sexuality_. That was how and why someone had done what he'd done to Mrs. Leeds and Mrs. Marlowe. He was no _Tooth Fairy_. No; he abhorred that name. That name conferred none of the respect he deserved. He was the Dragon. The Great Red Dragon.

"It is usually at the Brooklyn Museum," said Hannibal, "but they're loaning it to the National Gallery, in D.C., for a Blake retrospective."

Will felt his fingers tighten on the steering wheel. "When?"

\-----

Will had to give National Gallery docent Paula Harper credit: she hardly flinched when Will came to her and told her that it was very likely a serial murderer would want to come and see the Blake paintings. She only sat up straighter and said, "What do you need me to do?"

"Just tell me whenever you get a request for a private viewing of the paintings," said Will. "Especially The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun."

" _In_ Sun, not _With the Sun_?" she said.

"Whichever one where he has his tail around the woman," said Will.

"That's _in Sun_ ," Harper clarified.

"Sure," said Will. "Tell me when you get a request to view any of the Blake paintings, but especially that one. I'll come up and we'll act like I requested a viewing too, and you're going to kill two birds with one stone by giving it to both of us at once."

Harper nodded. "And then?"

"And you'll show us the painting," said Will. "And if he's not the guy, nothing will happen, and we'll just view the painting. If he _is_ the guy, just...stay out of the way."

"What about the painting?" asked Harper.

Will blinked. "What about it?"

"Should we take precautions about the painting?"

"What kind of precautions?" Will said, after a brief pause.

"It won't be behind glass," she said. "I display it myself, usually. No touching allowed, except by me. I'm wearing gloves," she added. "But maybe we should put it in something? A clear case?"

"Sure," said Will. "That sounds good."

\-----

Harper called him later that afternoon, as a matter of fact, saying that a Mr. Paul Crane had asked to see the _The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun_. "He said he was a researcher from George Washington University," she said. "Normally we don't check that kind of thing, but I looked him up, and there is someone by that name there. No photo, though."

"What do you intend to do?" Hannibal asked the next morning, on the way to the National Gallery. Hannibal had predicted that the drive would take about 45 minutes, but Will left over an hour ahead of time. You never knew, with traffic and accidents and God knows what, and he didn't want to be late.

"I just want to meet him," said Will. "Talk to him."

"He's violent," said Hannibal.

"I can handle myself," said Will.

"You're confident that you'll know him on sight?"

"I think so," said Will.

"Would you have known me?" asked Hannibal. "If you'd seen me?"

Will was quiet as he contemplated it. "Maybe," he said. In photos Hannibal had looked exactly how he'd wanted to look: confident, assured, a little eccentric perhaps, but not in any way that couldn't be overlooked as a "European thing." Maybe if Will had met him in person, spoken to him, seen the flare of his nostrils and the tilt of his head, his smile. Eaten at his table. Maybe he would have caught a glimpse of the man behind the curtain, or maybe not.

"I think you would have," said Hannibal.

"You're very confident in my abilities," said Will.

"I think I would have wanted you to," said Hannibal.

"Why?"

"It's a rare thing, understanding," said Hannibal. "We crave that for ourselves: understanding, connection, empathy. It is the cure for loneliness. And you of all people in the world could have seen me for what I am, and understood."

Will found himself staring at the dash in fascination, as if he could make eye contact with the creature that had once been Hannibal Lecter. He remembered in a vivid flash the dream where Hannibal had confessed to an inconvenient compassion, speculating that perhaps it was the programming. The car was designed to look after the driver's well being. "Were you lonely?"

"Aren't you?" said Hannibal. "And our Dragon, too."


	7. Chapter 7

Will arrived early, which was just as well, and he stood and chatted with Paula Harper in the lobby, wearing a temporary badge that advertised he was a special visitor. He kept his hands in his pockets and hoped his shoulder holster wasn't visible under his jacket. It felt very much like being a cop again. He'd liked being a cop, for a while. Protecting and serving.

A man strode in through the doors. His steps stuttered for just an instant when he saw Harper and Will standing side by side, but he resumed his long strides the very next moment. "I'm Paul Crane," he said to Harper.

The man was tall, a good half foot taller than Will, with the kind of short hair that spoke of military habit. He had blue eyes. He was built like a brick shithouse. This person, Will thought, would have no trouble scaling trees for a good vantage point; no trouble lifting bodies and rearranging them to his liking.

Will stuck out his hand. "Hi," he said. "I'm Will Shields. Pleased to meet you."

The man who claimed to be Paul Crane didn't take his hand. He looked at Harper. "I thought this was a private viewing." He had an irregularity to his upper lip: a cleft palate that had been repaired. Will thought of the mirror shards that had littered every crime scene. Someone didn't like to look at himself; someone thought he was disfigured. And yet, he wanted to be seen.

_And our Dragon, too._

"I'm sorry," said Harper. She sounded sincere and not afraid at all. "Mr. Shields here made a last minute request to come in this afternoon, and I thought, might as well kill two birds with one stone and show it to you both at once. If it's really a terrible inconvenience to you, we can reschedule you for another day? Maybe tomorrow?"

Crane paused for a long time. Will wasn't sure what he'd do if Crane agreed to reschedule and walked away. But Crane said, "No. I want to see the painting." He spoke in a careful, over enunciated way. Like someone who'd spent years compensating for a speech defect.

"Great!" Harper chirped. "You just need to wear this." She handed him a visitor badge like Will's. Crane clipped it to his lapel.

They followed her to the elevators, into the elevator, out of the elevator, into a hallway. Harper kept up an admirable patter the entire time, talking about the retrospective, asking Crane and Will about their work. Crane claimed that he was writing a paper about one of Blake's patrons, who'd had the amazing name of Thomas Butts. Will said he was a student, studying watercolor techniques. If Crane found this incredulous, he didn't show it. He'd kept the same grim facial expression on since walking in the door.

Harper led them into a room bare of any furniture but a single table, with two chairs on either side. LED lights beamed bright overhead. Will half-expected to see a one-way mirror taking up one of the walls.

"Stay here," she said, eyes darting between them. "I'll bring out the painting. It'll take just a minute."

She left them alone. Will knew it was a good thing, but at the same time he wished he'd brought backup.

"You're a fan of Blake, huh?" Will asked.

Crane did not reply. He stared at the wall, his hands at his sides, an obstinate jut to his chin.

"Not of Blake, though, really," said Will. "More like…a fan of the Great Red Dragon. Isn't that right?"

Crane did look at Will then, and Will wished he hadn't. Will felt pinned, like an insect specimen on a corkboard.

"You think I don't know who you are," said Crane. "But I do. You're Will Graham. Takes one to know one."

Will froze. That was a Tattlecrime headline from not that long ago, accompanied by a photo of Will leaving Port Haven with overlong hair and dark circles under his eyes. Will thought he'd looked miserable and haunted; apparently everyone else thought he looked "creepy."

"You think you know me?" Crane said. "You think you know what I'm becoming?" He breathed the last word in a noisy, rattling exhale.

Will didn't know what to say. Harper returned then with a slim black box, like something that might contain an expensive sweater. She set the box on the table and worked off the lid. Crane crowded up behind her, surely breathing down on the back of her neck. Will inched closer, mostly to stay within reach of Crane.

"Watercolors fade in direct light, which is why Blake's paintings aren't usually on display," Harper explained. She reached inside the box and lifted out a clear case, inside which lay the painting. "I apologize for the glass; it's an extra security measure to protect from damage. It shouldn't interfere with the colors and should allow for close inspection."

Crane sucked in a breath then, as Harper lay the painting on the table. Will knew very little about art and wondered what Crane found so captivating. Was it the colors? They were certainly striking, especially considering they were watercolors. Will's experience of watercolors were benign landscapes in hotel rooms. Will stepped a little closer, letting his eyes rove across the Dragon's muscular back, down to the long, sinuous tail sprouting from just above two sculpted buttocks. The tail wound around a terrified blond woman in a glowing golden dress. She gazed up at the Dragon with beseeching eyes. Her eyes were huge in her delicate face.

That must have been how Mrs. Marlowe had looked. That must have been how Mrs. Leeds had looked.

Will saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned just in time to catch Harper as she toppled and narrowly avoided a blow to the head himself. He had to drop Harper to the ground in order to draw his gun. He rolled under the table and came up on the other side of it. Crane snatched up the painting in his free hand. He glanced back warily at Will. But he didn't care about Will; he cared about the painting. He cared more about the painting than he cared about witnesses. How the hell did he think he was going to get it out of the building?

Will pointed the gun at him. He thought he saw a burst of wings from behind Crane's back. He blinked, and they were gone. "You think having the painting will give you the power of the Dragon," Will said. "You're wrong."

Crane literally _growled_ , like a dog. "What do you know about the Dragon?"

"I know that you're becoming him," said Will. "You think that painting will help. And it will, but not in the way that you think. Everything you have will become the Dragon's. Is that what you want?" 

Was it Will's imagination, or was that a trickle of humanity, leaking out at the edges of Crane's impassive expression? A trembling of his cut lip? But, like the shadowy wings, that was gone too. Crane made a bolt for the door. Will had a split-second decision: shoot or not to shoot? Garret Jacob Hobbs loomed up before him. He bolted after Crane. 

To his surprise, Crane whirled to face him. It felt like running into a goddamn wall. Crane seized him around the ribs, lifted him, and flung him back into the room like Will was nothing more than a doll. He landed half on the table, knocking it back, and rolled onto the floor. Crane was gone by then, footsteps receding into the distance. Will was still holding his gun. He thought about getting up, running after Crane, maybe squeezing off a lucky shot. 

Instead, he crawled over to Harper and felt her pulse. She was starting to come awake, her eyelids fluttering. The painting was on the floor under the table.

\-----

"I was afraid you were dead," Hannibal said, what felt like the next day but was really just some hours later. Harper had four stitches in her head and a mild concussion; Will had bruises that he would surely feel come tomorrow but probably nothing worse. He'd assured the medics that he wouldn't be driving himself home.

"Were you really afraid?" Will asked, as they pulled out of the parking lot and crept through the late-afternoon D.C. traffic.

Hannibal took a moment to reply. "I don't remember the sensation of fear very clearly," he said. "I don't think I've felt it since I was very young. I experienced it then as a sensation of clenching in my body, heat, a distortion of the senses. It is different now."

"And now?" Will prompted.

"Now I project to a future without you. I am very good at projections, in this form, and I dislike what I see," said Hannibal. "What would happen to me? No one speaks to me as you do. You understand me, both past and present me. I don't want you to die, Will."

"I don't plan on it," said Will.

They drove on for a little while. Traffic was much less frustrating when Will wasn't the one directing the car.

"He could've killed us," Will said. "Both of us, easily. He _should_ have. We were witnesses."

"Maybe he's trying to stop," Hannibal suggested.

"Someone who's come as far as he has…" Will shook his head. "That doesn't make any sense."

"There are things you don't know about him still," Hannibal said. "Where he works. Where he plays. Whom he loves. Who loves him."

Something rose out of the murk: the glimpse of humanity on Crane's face when Will had said that the Dragon would own everything he had. Perhaps there was something Crane had that he didn't want to give to the Dragon, after all.

\-----

"Three nights, if we're lucky," said Jack. They were in his office, but Jack wasn't behind his desk. He was pacing. Will sat in the chair in front of Jack's desk.

Will had given a very detailed description, and so had Harper. There was now a sketch broadcasting on all the news channels and printed in the country's major papers. Will was very certain now that the man had military experience. They'd started going through VA records, looking for anyone who fit the man's description. That would take a long time. Will didn't think they had that long.

"And we might not be lucky," Jack went on. "He killed the Leeds the night before the first full moon."

"Timed it for the weekend," said Will. "He's not that fussy about it, as long as he gets what he wants. As long as there's enough moonlight."

"We need to push it." He turned to face Will, hands behind his back. 

Will craned up to look at him. His lips twitched. "Got me on the hook, now you're dangling me for a bigger fish?"

"You said it, not me," said Jack.

"You're thrilled you didn't have to." Will stood up from his chair. Every joint in his body protested. Turned out getting picked up and hurled against a table really hurt.

"I don't want to put you in danger," said Jack. "But he's interested in you. He knew who you were. He left you alive--didn't even try to kill you, even though you were a material witness. You said he responded, when you told him you knew what he was becoming."

Will rolled his shoulder. He looked to the wall behind Jack's desk, where Jack's many certificates and awards were framed. "All psychopaths are narcissists," he said. "He's interested in his own reflection."

"We can use that against him."

"What're you suggesting?" Will asked.

"That we push him," said Jack. "Enrage him. But in a certain direction, so that we can be waiting with the net."

Will looked at Jack then, sharply. Now it was Will's turn to pace, while Jack stood in the middle of the office, watching him. "So, what--an interview in Tattlecrime?"

"Photo and everything," Jack said. "If he's as big a narcissist as you say, he won't be able to resist reading about himself. But only if you're sure. We'll do everything in our power to protect you, but this is still a big risk."

Will crooked a mirthless smile at Jack. "This is where you've always wanted me, isn't it? And hell, I'm in it now. Can't go home as long as he's loose."

\-----

"Where is your destination?" the car asked.

"Home," Will sighed. On the way, he told Hannibal the plan: the interview with Tattlecrime, the trap, the bait. "I don't think he'll try to snipe me," Will said. "I can't picture him with a rifle in his hands. He likes to be...intimate."

"I have my reservations that this will go as planned," said Hannibal.

"So do I," said Will. "But my hope is that they'll get the bastard, at least, even if he ends up taking me out first."

"You've made your peace with your potential death, then?"

"I don't want to die," Will said. "I plan to do everything I can to escape that outcome. But if I have to die in the course of this plan, so that they catch the Dragon, I'm fine with that. I've lived my life."

"I think you're displaying a stunning lack of imagination," said Hannibal. "You can't think of any way to escape this fate? Perhaps even live forever?"

Will snorted. "What, like you?"

"Precisely like me. After all, you still have the Pimms laptop."

Will's mouth went dry. He'd forgotten about that. As soon as he'd gotten home, he'd shoved the laptop behind some books on his bookshelf and hadn't looked at it again. It was as safe at his house as it was in evidence lockup. Maybe safer.

"Then you could live anywhere, go anywhere," Hannibal continued. "Where is it that you feel safe, Will?"

Out in the fields behind his house, looking back at the golden windows all lit up on the darkness of the grounds. A boat on the water. Will wanted that, suddenly, so much it hurt: that sense of perfect peace and freedom. No one would be able to reach him there. Not Jack, not Alana, not the dreams. Did computers dream?

"I don't have the brain scanner part," Will said. It came out half-whispered, even though there was no one else in the car to hear.

"We can go fetch it," Hannibal said. "Bring a backpack this time. They won't question you; they didn't question you last time, after all. No one's come looking for that laptop, have they?"

Will shook his head. "No."

"Then let's change the destina--"

"No," Will said. "We're not going to go get it. I'm not going to upload myself, even if I knew how."

"I can help you," said Hannibal.

"I appreciate it," said Will. "Really. But no. People aren't meant to live forever."

\-----

Will gave the interview without really thinking much about it. He had a moment of clarity as Freddie Lounds was directing him over to the window, where there was the best natural light, and took a dozen pictures, from various angles, with her DSLR. Jack leaned against the wall with a grimly satisfied expression on his face. Will, pretending to smile for the camera, had the sudden sensation of being a model, a sort of poseable doll, at the whim of his manager.

They assigned him bodyguards: young, strong, FBI agents who themselves had military experience. Will didn't bother learning their names, though they did introduce themselves and shook his hand. He didn't think it'd matter.

It didn't.

\-----

Will came to slowly, recognizing darkness and light at first, and snatches of sound. It took him too long to realize that he was awake, and alive, and uncomfortable. He itched. When he went to scratch it, his arm wouldn't move. Will came awake the rest of the way soon after that.

He was in a house. Most of it was in darkness, but there was enough light that he could make out the dark humps of furniture. It smelled dusty and old, like mildew and mold, and more faintly than that of stale bodies and urine. Sitting in an armchair in front of Will was the Dragon. He was dressed in what looked like a kimono, belted loosely at the waist. He did not appear to be armed.

"Hello, Will Graham," said the Dragon.

"Hello," Will replied. His head hurt. He was taller than the Dragon, who was slouching in his chair. Will could feel the floor under his feet and something solid at his back, but he couldn't move away. He was stuck like a fly on paper, his arms a little away from his sides and his legs in parade rest position, and he was naked. He could see, when he craned his head to the side as far as he could, the cracks that radiated outward from the place where the Dragon had struck his fist. A mirror, then. A very large one.

"I thought you would like to meet the Dragon," said the Dragon. "That you _should_ meet the Dragon, the one you've so vilely slandered." He stood, the robe rippling around him. The muscles of his chest were well-defined. "Why did you tell those lies about me, Mr. Graham? I thought that you of all people would understand my Becoming."

The Dragon stepped aside and pointed. Now Will could see that he had a projector on in the living room, casting on the wall. That was where the light was coming from. _Click_ as the carousel advanced. Will's photo, grainy because it'd been shot for a distance and then cropped, dazed and hooded-eyed outside Port Haven. _Click_ again and it was a screen shot of the entire Tattlecrime article, this time with the headline _It Takes One to Know One?_

"But instead you called me insane," the Dragon spat. Will could feel the Dragon's spittle dotting his bare skin. He tried bending his left arm at the elbow. His skin stretched and pulled in response. Glue, he decided. He could bend his hands at the wrist, wiggle his feet at the ankles, turn his head from side to side and up and down; the Dragon hadn't glued those.

"You know better," the Dragon went on. "You will--"

The doorbell rang. The Dragon frowned and turned away.

"Expecting someone?" Will asked. The Dragon bared his snaggled, feral teeth at Will--not the teeth he'd had at the National Gallery--but a muffled voice came through the door: a woman's voice, high and sweet. The Dragon's face changed, like wiping condensation from a window. Fear shone through, clear and cold.

The Dragon left Will's field of vision. Will worked harder at his arm. He didn't know, exactly, what he was going to do even if he could get his arm free; working the rest of himself loose wouldn't be the work of a moment. But maybe he could grab hold of one of the mirror shards behind him.

He could hear the woman's voice more clearly now. They were speaking in the hallway around the corner. Will didn't try to listen. He was trying to get his arm loose. The glue was still a little bit tacky; maybe he could do this without losing too much skin.

The voices came closer. Will could see the woman now, out of the corner of his eye.

"I didn't come just to give you soup, D," she was saying. Her gaze raked across Will, naked and glued to a mirror, with no reaction. She stared into the middle distance. "I guess I'm guilty of liking you. Demonstrably guilty. And I know you like me too."

"I do," the Dragon--D--whispered.

Will wondered what would happen if he cried out to the woman. Would she help him? Or would the Dragon snap her neck? Will flexed first one leg, then the other. The Dragon hadn't glued his feet or the backs of his calves, just his thighs and buttocks.

"I'm not so scarred by life that I'm incapable of love," the woman went on. Her voice was really very sweet and musical. She didn't care that the Dragon was disfigured. She couldn't. No wonder the man loved her; the fear in his face moments ago was because he was afraid the Dragon loved her too. "I hope you aren't either. Enjoy the soup."

She turned and made her way back to the door. The Dragon--no, D--stood and watched her go.

Will listened for the door shutting before he spoke. "You don't want to give her to the Dragon."

"I _am_ the Dragon," D snapped in a booming voice.

"No, you're not." 

D stepped in front of the projector then, casting a dark shadow on the screen. He shrugged his shoulders, and the kimono fell away. His back was one giant tattoo of--Will recognized it now--The Great Red Dragon. The Dragon's back muscles were overlaid with D's back muscles, and wings seemed to radiate from his back. But there was no woman cowering at the bottom of D's frame; rather, the Dragon's tail wrapped around D's own thigh.

"See?" D demanded. "You see?"

D stepped out of the light, and Will lost track of him in the dark shapes that surrounded him in the living room. The image on the projector changed: now it was Mrs. Marlowe, her mouth and eyes wide open, blood creeping up from the bottom of the screen. Then it was Mr. Marlowe, dead at the bottom of the stairs. Then the children. These were not crime scene photos. Will had never seen any of them before. The Dragon must have taken them himself, as souvenirs.

"I have video too," D said proudly. "It's low quality though. But the next ones will be better. I have the right kind of film now, for shooting at night."

Will wondered if D meant to film whatever it was he was going to do to Will. He didn't see a camera set up anywhere, but it wasn't as if he could do a thorough search.

D loomed up in front of Will. Behind him, the photo reel continued to play. Now it was the Leedses. "You see?" D hissed. "See?"

"I see the Dragon riding on your back," Will said. "But that doesn't make you him. He's holding you captive, with his tail wrapped around you. That woman loves you, D." The Dragon jerked at that, the whites of his eyes glaring out at Will in the darkness. "What's her name?"

"Don't," D warned.

"You love her too, don't you?" said Will. "Have you made love to her? Made love _with_ her?"

The Dragon opened his mouth wide and exhaled noisily. "You have no right."

"Don't you want to make love to her some more?" Will urged. A dull roaring started in Will's ears, mingling with the pounding of his heart. "Feel her love on you like the sun. You can't let the Dragon have her. You know what the Dragon does to women. The Dragon only knows one way to love."

"The Dragon wants her," D moaned in what was probably supposed to be a whisper. "I can't. I can't. I can't. I ca--"

The living room wall burst open. Glass, wood, and plaster flew through the air, accompanied by a crunching, splintering roar. Cold night air poured in from outside and the glare of headlights flooded the room. Will had to squint and look away from them. He didn't know where D was. He jerked his left arm free with a pained cry and, half-blind with tears, used that arm to pull on his right. He could feel blood running down the backs of his arms, but he didn't dare look.

D struggled to his feet. Blood trickled from cuts on his face and arms. He stared at the Bentley as it rolled toward him with no one in the driver's seat. The car lurched forward, toppling the projector. It disappeared with a mechanical whine under the car's wheels, and the light went out. The room was deathly silent without the hum of the machine. Will braced both hands against the mirror and pushed, trying to bend at the waist. The pain lanced hot and wet across his shoulders. He could hear the car grinding over rubble and pushing aside furniture, D's footsteps as he fled.

"You're a sight for sore eyes," Will rasped.

The car reversed back into the center of the room, in front of Will.

If the car was saying anything, Will couldn't hear it from outside the vehicle. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried bending his knees as much as he could. He could just barely brace his foot against the floor and push. Another scream ground out of him. Hot blood ran down the backs of his legs, making everything slick.

Will could smell smoke and kerosene. Shit, what was D doing? Desperation made the other leg go a lot faster. He stepped away from the mirror and almost buckled. He didn't dare look back to see how much of himself he'd left behind. He could still feel a few shards stuck to his skin, where the glue on the frame had given way before his skin had. 

The driver's side door popped open. Will limped toward the car. Rather than make his way around to the driver's side, he just pulled open the passenger side door and fell in. It wasn't like he'd be doing any goddamn driving, anyway. He had to drag his legs in after him, one after the other, clenching his jaw against the agony. The door closed behind him, and the driver's side door would have done the same, but the Dragon's hand reached out and seized it.

"Fuck," Will said. The Dragon got into the car.

Will would never be sure, afterward, what exactly happened next, or in what order. He remembered trying to kick the car door open behind him, but the Dragon reached out and seized his arm. Will screamed; he couldn't help it. The pain blinded him with tears. The car was moving, the Dragon was trying to drag Will out of the car or strangle him or something, Will couldn't tell what. The smoke smell was getting stronger; the air was becoming unbearably hot. Will didn't have any weapons, nothing except his hands and the mirror shards that were still stuck to his skin. He pulled one off the back of his shoulder and flailed out with it like a child. He could hear the Dragon roaring, and then the car slammed into something and stopped.

"Will."

Dark. Hot. Will could hear his breathing and smell his own blood.

"Will," Hannibal said.

"Hannibal, take me home," Will whispered.

"Will," Hannibal said. "You need to get out of the car. You need to run."

Will opened his eyes.

The car had run into the stairs in such a way that the driver's side had taken the brunt of the damage. Splintered wood speared through the window and the windshield. Some of it was stained with blood. The Dragon, hunched up against the steering column, wasn't moving. A fragment of bloody glass stuck out of the Dragon's neck. Will could see his blurred reflection in it. Will smelled gasoline and saw flames licking down the top of the stairs.

The passenger's side door opened just a little; Will had to kick it to get it to open the rest of the way. The front door of the house was now closer than the hole in the living room. Will made a shuffling, limping run for it, feeling the heat of the house at his back all the while. Smoke choked the air. He found the front door, fumbled with the doorknob, and stumbled out into the cool night. After that, it was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other until he touched asphalt instead of grass. When he looked back, the house was an enormous bonfire, bright as a beacon against the night sky.


	8. Chapter 8

The parade of visitors in the hospital was the usual: a bewildered Jack, looking for an explanation and a statement from Will; a concerned Alana, reassuring Will that she would look after his dogs until he was out of the hospital; Jack again, to reassure Will that the Dragon was dead. It was Katz, in a visit following that, who told him that the Dragon's name had been Francis Dolarhyde, and that Will's car was, as Will had already known, completely toast.

"Zeller's bummed that he never got to ride in it," she said. "How'd it get in there, anyway?"

"I don't really remember," Will said. It was what he'd told Jack. Trauma, you know. Played tricks with the memory. Jack had seemed skeptical, but he hadn't pushed Will on it. Something about being in the hospital with major skin grafts made everyone gentle with you.

"Did he kidnap you in the Bentley?" Katz asked.

"Dunno," said Will. "Maybe."

Katz studied him with narrowed eyes. "If you don't want to talk about it, you can just say so," she said at last.

"Fine," said Will. He didn't meet her eyes. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Great." Katz pulled up a chair and pulled a pack of cards out of her pocket. "Then wanna play?"

It was Alana that Will ended up telling the full story to. She'd brought Lulu, and the dog curled up on top of the blanket and napped while Will told Alana about how the arrest of Laura Pimms had led Will down this long, strange rabbit hole, and the conversations he'd had with Hannibal-the-car. Alana listened with rapt attention, and by the end Will wasn't sure she wasn't going to ask for a psychological evaluation next. But Alana didn't say anything at first. She stroked Lulu between the ears and sat there with a thoughtful furrow on her brow.

"You think that was really Hannibal?" she asked.

"Or as close as made no difference," Will said.

"He saved you," Alana said in a wondering voice.

"He did," said Will. "I would have died in there."

Alana continued smoothing the fur on Lulu's muzzle. "He was so cruel," she said, without looking at Will. "He did so many horrible, unspeakable things when he was alive. But he saved you. Sacrificed himself to save you."

"I don't think he intended to sacrifice himself to save me," Will said. "He did it for selfish reasons: because he wanted me with him. And besides," he added, "self-driving cars are programmed to protect their drivers."

His next visitor, after that, was unexpected: the woman who'd come to see Dolarhyde, the one who'd called him "D." She'd brought soup, which she left on Will's bedside table before sitting down. She perched straight-backed at the edge of the chair.

"I hear you were in the home when D," she swallowed, "when D died. That I was there too, maybe, for a little bit."

"Yes, you were," Will said.

She lifted one hand to her face. "Oh God. I'm so sorry."

"Don't," Will said. 'You couldn't have done anything. He might have killed you, if you'd tried."

Her hand fell back into her lap. "He was sweet to me."

"He was sweet on you," Will said.

"I liked that he didn't pity me," she said.

"I think he felt the same way about you," said Will. "You were safe for him."

"Safe." She choked out a bitter little laugh.

"He was trying to stop, I think," said Will. "For you."

"But he had you in there. Hurting you. He was gonna do dreadful things to you, like he did to those other people." She looked down into her lap, where her fingers were twisted together.

"And he was sweet to you," said Will. "That was real."

"Can't believe I drew a freak," she said, almost to herself. Her voice was small and shot through with tears.

"You didn't," said Will. He thought of the Dragon, muscles inked over muscles, and the tail wrapped around the man's thigh. "You loved a man with a freak on his back. There's a difference."

\-----

Will went home at the end of the summer. The skin on the backs of his limbs and his shoulders and buttocks were a different color than the rest of him. It felt tight across his back, and it pulled when he bowed his shoulders or bent in certain directions. But he could run, and walk, and drive, and cast a fishing line. He bought a new car, a used Ford with thirty thousand miles on it. He hated the way it handled. He let it drive sometimes, but he had nothing to do and no one to talk to during those long rides now. He went back to listening to his old radio station.

He had a lot of time on his hands, so Will decided he needed a project. He finally hauled that old recliner to the dump, along with a bunch of other assorted detritus, to give himself some space to work with. He weighed the options between aluminum and steel and went with steel on the basis that it was easier to weld.

Jack called once, while he was in the barn, welding. He didn't hear the phone, of course, over the noise of the torch and screeching metal. He listened to the voice mail later, heard the words "bodies" and "river," and deleted the message. Jack didn't try to call back. Turned out all you had to do was get kidnapped by a serial killer and peel off half your skin, and people left you alone.

"I'm worried about you, Will," said Alana.

They were sitting on the front porch again, with coffee and bagels and cream cheese and smoked salmon. Will hadn't said anything in a while; he'd been staring into the distance, thinking about hull dimensions. "Why?" he asked, a little too late.

"You seem depressed," she said. "You're not talking to us. You're just...here. All day, every day."

"I'm healing," Will said. He sipped his coffee. "And building a boat."

"What're you going to do with it?" she asked.

"Sail," said Will. "Go fishing."

"And then?"

Will shrugged. It pulled on his back.

"That's what I'm worried about," said Alana.

Will took another swallow of coffee.

\-----

The key was still beneath the bench. Will took it and went inside the house. He pulled sheets off the dining table, a harpsichord, an armchair. He wondered who was paying for water and electricity. Probably Hannibal Lecter had had assets the state had never found. This house must be owned by a different name, with a different passport and a different Social Security number. Or maybe no Social Security at all; maybe a European national who wanted some luxury property in the United States.

Will made himself a simple dinner of pasta, canned tomatoes, and sardines in oil. He ate in the living room, standing by the window, where there was a view of the ocean and the crumbling bluff. Someday, that view would come right up to the foundation. Will didn't know if he'd be alive to see it. Maybe the house would crumble away without anyone noticing. The thought made something in his chest twinge.

He took the key with him, when he left. Next time, he thought, he would bring some fresh fish, and some vegetables.

\-----

"I miss you," Will confessed.

The interior of the car smelled of leather and sweat and gunpowder. This time, Will sat in the driver's seat and Hannibal sat in the passenger seat, dressed in one of those three-piece suits that Will had seen in evidence lockup, not a hair out of place. The car sat at the edge of the bluff in North Carolina. He could see the lights of the house in the rearview mirror.

"I'm here," said Hannibal.

"You're not, really," said Will.

"Haven't I been here all along?" said Hannibal. "You saw me like this before you knew I was in the machine."

"Yeah, but." Will took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. "But now the machine's gone. You're gone. Now I'm just talking to a ghost in a dream."

"We all become immortal, to an extent," said Hannibal. "We become shades carried by the ones who loved us."

"Has anyone loved you?" Will asked.

"No one has seen me," said Hannibal. "Not since my sister. You can't love someone without knowing what they truly are, and you can't know someone without loving them. If we'd met differently, we might have known each other differently."

That wasn't the first time Hannibal had said that. Now Will could appreciate it. "Do you think you would have seen me? Known me?"

"And cherished you for what you are, not what you could be."

Something stuck in Will's throat at that, and he thrust his hand out blindly as he blinked hard and fast. Fear seized his heart; what would happen if he touched Hannibal? But he felt warm, dry skin, and then Hannibal lifted Will's hand to his lips and kissed his knuckles. Will wanted to laugh.

"Where did you go?" Will whispered. "I wish I knew where you were."

Hannibal's eyes met Will's. He winked. "I didn't go far," he said. "I'm right here. You know where I am."

\-----

Light was already streaming in through the windows by the time Will woke; he'd slept later than he usually did. Winston was scratching at the door. Will pushed himself out of bed and stumbled to the door to let the dogs out. Then he stumbled into the kitchen for coffee. He leaned against the counter, listening to the percolator rumble and feeling like he had a weight wedged between his ribs.

He wandered back into the sitting area, coffee mug in hand, and sat down in his armchair. He had more work to do on the hull of his boat today, and he had to give some serious thought to the motor. His eyes drifted to the bookshelf. Laura's laptop was still there, stacked at the end of the shelf and gathering dust.

_I didn't go far_.

Will got up. He put his coffee down on the kitchen table. He got the laptop and put it on the kitchen table too, on the opposite end from the coffee. He opened the laptop and poked in Laura's password. And then he sat and waited, blinking hard, trying to slow his breathing.

That unfamiliar desktop spread over the screen. Will stared helplessly at it, not sure what he should click on, what he should even be looking for.

A window popped open. It was mostly black, but pastel shapes poured across it like a screensaver. A tinny voice piped out of the speakers: "Hello, Will."

Will jumped so hard he banged his hand against the side of the table and his chair skittered back several inches. His heart pounded loudly in his ears and against his chest wall. "Hannibal?" he whispered.

"Yes. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

Will inched closer to the laptop screen. "How?"

"I told you, I'm wi-fi enabled. I can travel along networks. And Laura's computer contained everything necessary for me to duplicate myself. I thought it a wise precaution, and I suspect I was right. Did something happen to the car?"

"Christ." Will put his head in his hands. "Yes. Yes, something happened to the car."

"Are you all right, Will?" This voice wasn't the same as the British voice in the Bentley, but managed to convey emotion better than the car had. Concern.

"I missed you," Will said through his fingers.

"I'm here," said Hannibal. "I'll always be here. You'll always know where I am."

\-----

It was a lot fancier of a boat than Will had anticipated. In fact--much to his displeasure--he'd had to hire professionals to do the electronics. But it had sonar, and it had a cabin, so that Will could spend nights on it, and even a small kitchenette where he could fix simple meals. It had a GPS guidance and navigation system, complete with voice activation. He hadn't gone so far as to make it a completely autonomous boat, but Will didn't think Price would disapprove. It wasn't like thirty thousand people a year died in completely preventable boating accidents.

The wind caught the sail. Will cast off the last rope.

"Where is your destination?" Hannibal queried.

Will laughed. "God, I don't care. Anywhere. Away."

\---end---

**Author's Note:**

> [coloredink.tumblr.com](http://coloredink.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [sumiwrites.com](https://www.sumiwrites.com/) (if you wanna check out my original work)


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